Midnight's Children, 1981, Booker Prize, then in 1993 the Booker of Bookers. The Satanic Verses, 1988, fatwa, the decade of police protection, the assassination attempt that nearly killed him in upstate New York in August 2022. The single most consequential novelist the Indian diaspora has produced — and an artist whose work made it impossible to think about Bombay in English without thinking through his sentences. Born in Bombay in 1947, the year of Partition, into a Kashmiri-Muslim family. Rugby, then King's College Cambridge, then advertising, then in 1975 the first novel. Has lived in London and, since the late 1990s, New York. Knighted in 2007 — a knighthood Iran formally protested. The fatwa was lifted in name in 1998 and never lifted in practice. His persistence at the desk is, by now, its own moral fact.