Who

Salman Rushdie is the Booker prize-winning author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, a newly minted knight, and the subject of a death sentence. He's better known to tabloid readers as the grizzled old man who was once married to Padma Lakshmi.

Backstory

A native of Bombay, Rushdie was educated at an English boarding school and attended Cambridge before working as an advertising copywriter. He published his first novel, Grimus, in 1975, and then made a big splash with his follow-up, 1980's Midnight's Children—about children born on the cusp of India's independence from colonial rule who possess special powers—which won England's Booker prize. Since then, he's amassed an oeuvre of nine novels, including 2005's Shalimar the Clown and his latest, The Enchantress of Florence—for which his agent Andrew Wylie secured seven figure advances—as well as several story collections and works of non-fiction. Rushdie's writing attracts admiration and disdain in equal measure, with some critics lauding his imagination and exuberance but others finding his books pretentious and impenetrable. A running joke about Midnight's Children is that no one has ever actually finished it.

Of note

Rushdie was forced into hiding on Valentine's Day 1989, when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa—a death sentence—against him for his irreverent depiction of the prophet Mohammed in The Satanic Verses. For the next decade, the author was forced to live in hiding under the protection of the British police. In 1998, the Iranian government promised that the fatwa would not be pursued, but more recently a number of the country's religious leaders have reaffirmed it, and the author's 2007 British knighthood has inflamed matters: The speaker of the Iranian parliament decried England for the move, and a spokesperson for Pakistan's foreign ministry also criticized the honor. On a lighter note, the fatwa was fodder for an episode of Seinfeld, in which the character of Kramer thinks he's run into Rushdie, using the pseudonym "Sal Bass," at a health club.

Health report

In the '90s, the droopy-lidded author was diagnosed with ptosis, a condition where the muscles around the eye become weak—Rushdie reportedly had to hold his eyes open to read—and he underwent surgery in 1999 to correct the problem.

Personal

Rushdie has had nearly as many wives as books published. His first marriage was in 1976 to an Englishwoman, Clarissa Luard, the mother of his adult son Zafar. He then married American writer Marianne Wiggins, divorced her, and married Elizabeth West, with whom he has a young son, Milan. Until July 2007, he was married to wife No. 4, Padma Lakshmi, the much younger model and Top Chef host.

Habitat

Rushdie commutes back and forth between New York and Atlanta, where he's a distinguished writer in residence at Emory. Despite still living under the threat of death, Rushdie says he lives a relatively normal existence in his adopted city of New York. "I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker," he's said.