#salman-rushdie

#salman-rushdie

The night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was fretting about her best friend. Kamilah Aisha Moon was due to read a poem at the ceremony, but no one had heard from her. Her phone was going straight to voicemail and staff at her hotel said she hadn't checked in. We'll find her. She wouldn't miss your wedding, Griffiths's sister, Melissa, assured her.

"When I'm writing fiction, I tend not to read fiction. I actually don't want other people's voices to sneak into my head," Rushdie said recently. That's not to say that other writers' books aren't an important part of his process-posing questions, providing instruction, and offering models of characters. Not long ago, he joined us to discuss a handful of works that have offered guidance for his own writing, including a novella that appears in " The Eleventh Hour," his latest book,

Imagine that you knew nothing about me, that you had arrived from another planet, perhaps, and had been given my books to read, and you had never heard my name or been told anything about my life or about the attack on The Satanic Verses in 1989. Then, if you read my books in chronological order, I don't believe you would find yourself thinking, Something calamitous happened to this writer's life in 1989.