Salman Rushdie is a champion of imagination, ambiguity and liberty

Since infancy Salman Rushdie has been tenaciously resilient. In 1949, aged two, he fell gravely ill with typhoid and his father scoured pharmacies in Bombay to find a new, life-saving drug. In 1984 a bout of double pneumonia put him in hospital in London. After 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa that called for his murder, Britain’s security services thwarted several assassination plots. In March 2020 the writer, then 72 and asthmatic, spent weeks seriously sick with covid-19. Now he is recovering from the ten knife injuries to his eyes, neck and torso inflicted on August 12th at a literary event in Chautauqua, New York. Sir Salman is persevering once again.