Rushdie writes the memoir in the third person, referring to himself as Joseph Anton and implying that the conditions of life in hiding shifted some aspects of his identity. In the year of its publication, it was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Other than a brief recollection of his formative years developing as a writer, the memoir is limited to the period of Rushdie’s life under the fatwa, which extends into the present day. The fatwa was issued in the wake of some Muslims’ critique of Rushdie’s controversial political views, especially those presented in his 1988 work, The Satanic Verses, which included tributes to modernist authors Anton Chekhov and Joseph Conrad. Its title refers to the pseudonym Rushdie used while in hiding, after the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, enacted a political and religious injunction (called a “fatwa”) against him. Joseph Anton: A Memoir is the 2012 memoir of British-Indian contemporary novelist Salman Rushdie.
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