Salman Rushdie and defending freedom of expression

Novelist SALMAN RUSHDIE is recovering from an attack that occurred before his speech at the Chautauqua Institution in New York on Friday. The motives of the suspect in custody remain unclear, but for years, Rushdie famously lived in hiding with police protection after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death in 1989 following the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses.

In recent years, Rushdie has lived a very public life. He’s been a favorite guest on Radio Times talking about his novels Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Quichotte. This hour, we’ll listen back to a 2013 interview with Salman Rushdie on his book, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, which chronicled the nine years he spent fearing for his life and about the importance of protecting free expression.

And we’ll hear from novelist and University of Toronto English professor  RANDY BOYAGODA and SUMMER LOPEZ, with PEN America, about Rushdie’s contributions and courage and the threats writers and artists continue to face for expressing their ideas and imaginations.

We recommend

The Atlantic, To Support Salman Rushdie, Just Read Him – We can more readily demonstrate our solidarity with him and advance the principles he embodies by committing to literary works bold and ambitious enough to make the very acts of writing, publishing, and reading once more daringly world-changing, even, if must be, dangerous.

The New York Times, The Stabbing of Salman Rushdie Renews Free Speech Debates – After the attack, writers and world leaders hailed Rushdie as a symbol of free expression. But the battle lines around his novel “The Satanic Verses” were never cleanly drawn.

The Washington Post, Book bans are threatening American democracy. Here’s how to fight back – “What has reared its head now is a systematic effort to wage the political war and the culture war by using our schools and libraries as a battleground”