Posted on 10/07/2006 9:39:05 AM PDT by Dark Skies
Novelist Salman Rushdie will join the faculty of Emory University and donate his archive to the institution, marking the writer's first extended relationship with a university, Emory officials said Friday.
Rushdie will join the school in the spring of 2007 and lead a graduate seminar, participate in undergraduate courses and deliver lectures during his five-year appointment.
"We'll have one of modern literature's giants on our faculty," said Emory President James Wagner. "And students will have access to his records - and the man himself. We're very, very pleased."
Rushdie, the author of "The Satanic Verses," was forced into hiding for a decade after the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a 1989 fatwa, or opinion on Islamic law, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie because the book allegedly insulted Islam. In 1998, the Iranian government declared it would not support but could not rescind the fatwa.
The archive will include notes, photographs, manuscripts, letters and two of Rushdie's early unpublished novels. It also features the private journal Rushdie kept detailing his life under the fatwa, said Steve Enniss, director of Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Books Library.
"He's a compulsive journal writer, and given the trajectory of his life and his life story, that journal will be of great interest to future generations," he said.
The archive will be open to the public, offering researchers and students more insight on Rushdie's inner turmoil while he was in hiding.
"While the archive will document his creative development and writing life, it will also give a sense of how he as a human being struggled during the years of the fatwa," Enniss said.
Talks between Rushdie and Emory began in 2004, when he delivered a series of lectures at the school's Decatur campus. The school's archivists are now eagerly preparing to receive the first portions of Rushdie's archive, which is split between London and New York.
A native of India, Rushdie's novel "Midnight's Children" won Britain's Booker Prize, and was selected in 1993 as the best novel in 25 years of the Booker Prize.
Who writes this stuff? And how did they miss high school English altogether?
Not sure I see your point?
lol...I get ya.
. . . more importantly, where is this idiot's editor, and why didn't he catch this egregious error? My boss would kill me if I ever let something this bad get out the door.
Naah. They merely extended the fatwa to include all of us non-Islamofascists.
So he is as safe as the rest of us? Comforting to know, isn't it? LOL!
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