Livraria Lello brings Salman Rushdie to Portugal
On September 17th, Livraria Lello receives the international award-winning author Salman Rushdie for a conversation with journalist, writer, and literary critic Isabel Lucas about his remarkable literary career.
Salman Rushdie is the author of twenty-one books, most notably Midnight's Children, which won him the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Books in 1993, and Best of the Booker in 2008. But it was with Satanic Verses that the author rose to worldwide fame. The book was considered an affront "against Islam" by the Iranian authorities, leading to Salman Rushdie being sentenced to death and living under police protection for decades.
On February 14, 1989, Salman Rushdie received a phone call from a BBC journalist telling him that he had just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeni. It was the first time the writer heard the word Fatwa. His crime? He wrote a novel - The Satanic Verses - which according to the Iranian authorities represented an affront "against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran. This episode, impossible to ignore whenever we talk about Salman Rushdie, forced the author to go underground, living from one country to another and sparked a wave of unprecedented universal solidarity, expressed by writers from all over the world, including the Portuguese writer José Saramago.
Considered one of the best authors of our time, read and studied all over the world, Ahmed Salman Rushdie is the only writer to have been awarded the famous Booker Prize twice for The Midnight's Children. He is also one of the names featured in the installation Livraria Lello x Time: What Makes a Nobel?, a tribute to the best in world literature, which can be visited on the second floor of Livraria Lello.
With captivating writing, Rushdie's work, consisting mainly of fiction, is marked by a fascination for Indo-European culture and mythology expressed through allegorical fables about historical and philosophical themes. Portugal and its history are often present in his books, such as in Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, in which the author tells the story of Geronimo Menezes, a descendant of a Portuguese Menezes, or in The Moor’s Last Sigh, in which Camões is a character.
The last time the author was in Portugal was in 2016, at the Festival Literário Internacional de Óbidos (FOLIO), where he was welcomed by hundreds of readers. Eight years later, Rushdie will be at Livraria Lello for a conversation with Isabel Lucas, to which all book lovers are invited. The session is free, with limited capacity. It will also be possible to watch the event via live streaming on the Facebook page or on the Youtube channel of Livraria Lello.
