I don't believe in animals being bullied and tormented until they caricature human behaviour - I think it's a nasty practice. It's cruel, and an insult to the creatures dignity. I saw a lot of this growing up in India and would like to see an end to the spectacle.
Sir Salman Rushdie (Award winning author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses)
As a celebrated and often controversial writer and freedom of speech campaigner, Cambridge educated Sir Salman Rushdie has never been afraid of putting his head above the parapet to voice often unpopular opinions. He is held up as an example by many for having the courage of his convictions whatever the repercussions.
Many people will know him best because of the furor caused over his book ‘The Satanic Verses, which set him at odds with many Muslims and a ‘fatwa’ (Islamic death sentence notice), issued by Ayatolleh Khomeini of Iran in 1989. Despite the media storm that was caused around this book, Sir Salman Rushdie has written many other success fiction and non fiction books and is a mentor to a whole new generation of young Indo-Anglian writers.
His second novel, the acclaimed Midnight's Children, was published in 1981 and premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2002. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers' Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award's 25-year history.
Sir Salman Rushdie is Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made Distinguished Fellow in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 1995. He was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1993 and the Aristeion Literary Prize in 1996, and has received eight honorary doctorates. He was elected to the Board of American PEN in 2002. The subjects in his new book, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002 (2002), range from popular culture and football to twentieth-century literature and politics.
Sir Salman Rushie is a man whose voice transcends the boundaries of generations, cultures and creeds. In his own words” Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” which translates as “Free speech is life itself”.
Hauser Bears is honoured to have his support, in our conservation work and our fight against cruelty to bears.