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),
The Satanic Verses, and
Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.
Salman Rushdie is celebrated as a storyteller of the highest order, illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.
Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie's intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad ways, a love letter to literature itself. Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison mean to him, whether on the page or in person. He delves deep into the nature of "truth," revels in the vibrant malleability of language and the creative lines that can join art and life, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism, and censorship.
Enlivened on every page by Rushdie's signature wit and dazzling voice, Languages of Truth offers the author's most piercingly analytical views yet on the evolution of literature and culture even as he takes us on an exhilarating tour of his own exuberant and fearless imagination.
Languages of Truth is a writer's diary even when it works as a handbook on storytellingFrom Hans Christian Andersen and Shakespeare to hijras and Hitchens, from Amrita Sher-Gill, Osama Bin Laden, Heraclitus and Pythagoras to political courage, Carrie Fisher and Covid, the author's new collection of essays shows off the variety of his interests and his formidable intellectRushdie takes readers on a literary pilgrimage, bringing to life the art of storytelling and a writer's quest to 'approach the truth through lies'Salman Rushdie's latest volume of non-fiction bristles with candour and courage. The essays in Languages of Truth leave you buoyant. There is more joy here than despair.
