“Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.”

Indian-born British and American novelist

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. He is known for fiction that blends magical realism with historical elements, and for writing about movement, rupture, and exchange between Eastern and Western worlds. His novels are often set on the Indian subcontinent and frequently center Indian characters or family life. Midnight's Children, his second novel, won the Booker Prize in 1981, and later it was selected twice as the best of all Booker winners, for the prize's 25th and 40th anniversaries.