Salman Rushdie

Gish Jen

Gish Jen's fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and dozens of anthologies and textbooks. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has been the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award as well as a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also held NEA, Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Radcliffe fellowships; has been awarded honorary doctorates from Emerson College and Williams College; delivered the William E. Massey lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard in 2012; and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the MacArthur Foundation. Her ninth and most recent book is a collection of stories spanning the 50 years since the opening of China to the West. It is entitled Thank You, Mr. Nixon.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America and the recipient of the PEN Centenary Courage Award. His books have been translated into over forty languages. In 2023, he was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year.

Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths