The city he lived in until he turned 14 (before moving to Pakistan and, subsequently, England) first occupied centre-stage in his work in 1981 -- when Midnight's Children was published -- and continued to make an appearance in the years that followed, from Shame (1983) to The Satanic Verses (1988) to The Moor's Last Sigh (1995).

India continued to play her part too, be it in collections of essays such as Imaginary Homelands (1992) and Step Across This Line (2002), or novels such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and his latest work, the much-applauded Shalimar the Clown (2005).

These days, Rushdie is doing publicly what he has long done in private -- mentoring young writers. He is currently a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where, for the next five years as distinguished writer in residence, he will teach weekly literature seminars for graduate students. Emory has no doubts about this valuable addition to their faculty. Which is why it also opted to buy his papers -- almost 100 boxes of personal material including computers with his e-mails, pages of typescript for The Satanic Verses and a great deal more.

Over the last twenty years, then, Rushdie has slowly moved from freelance advertisement copywriter to successful novelist; from international writer to world treasure.

He has, along the way, picked up everything from the Booker Prize for Fiction (for Midnight's Children) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, to an Arts Council Writers' Award, Whitbread Novel Award, Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (for Shame), Writers' Guild Award (for 1990's Haroun and the Sea of Stories) and, for good measure, the Booker of Bookers (again, for Midnight's Children). And then there are those eight honorary doctorates laid at his feet by universities from around the world.

Image: Signing copies of his books for fans in Kolkata

Photograph: Deshakalyan Chowdhury/AFP/Getty Images
Also see: Rushdie, Naipaul lock horns over BJP

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