During his visit, Rushdie will stay at the Gresham Palace, which will serve as the venue for many of the programmes on his schedule. A book signing, open to the public, will start at 16:00 in the Libri Bookshop in Budapest's Mammut shopping centre. The signing has been organised for the launch of a new series of all of Rushdie's books in Hungarian by the publishers Ulpius-ház.
Rusdie was born into a rich Muslim family in Bombay in 1947. He went to the UK for university, attending his father's alma mater Cambridge. Rushdie worked for advertising companies before becoming a full-time writer.
Rushdie's first novel, Grimus, the title of which is an anagram of Simurg, the mythical Persian bird, was published in 1975. But it was not until the publication of his second novel, Midnight's Children, in 1981, that he was placed in the literary spotlight. The book won the Booker Prize and shaped the course of Indian writing in English for the entire decade.
After the success of Midnight's Children, about the birth of the modern nation of India, Rushdie wrote Shame (1983), in which he depicted the political turmoil in Pakistan.
In his later works, Rushdie turned towards the Western world. In the 1980s, he visited Nicaragua and transcribed his experiences into The Jaguar Smile (1987).
The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Muslim world because of what was perceived to be an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad in the book. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, issued a fatwa, or a bounty, on Rushdie's head. As a result, Rushdie was forced to live under police protection for years to come.
Rushdie followed The Satanic Verses with Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and East, West (1994). The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), explored commercial and cultural links between India and Spain, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), presented an alternative history of modern rock music. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received, in India, the prestigious Crossword Fiction Award, and was, in Britain, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards.
