Salman Rushdie Trivia
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59 free Salman Rushdie trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Salman Rushdie trivia quiz covers one of the most celebrated and most threatened writers alive. The easy questions are the ones any reader can answer: where he was born, the novel that won the Booker and then the Booker of Bookers, the book that provoked a fatwa and the leader who issued it. From there it moves into his early life, from the Wizard of Oz that made a writer of him to the advertising slogans he wrote for cream cakes and American Express before Midnight's Children made his name. The harder end is for literature students and pub-quiz specialists: the science-fiction debut nobody read, the Pakistan novel that lost the Booker, the alias he used in hiding, the translators who were attacked, the exploding book bomb in Paddington, the annual unfunny Valentine from Iran, the U2 song he wrote lyrics for, his cameo in Bridget Jones's Diary, the memoirs Joseph Anton and Knife, and the fifteenth novel about a woman who dreams a city into being. His five marriages, his knighthood and his eye are covered too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the author, his novels and the fatwa before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Booker Prize, Indian literature and famous authors quizzes next.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Salman Rushdie born in 1947?
Bombay
Bombay, now Mumbai, was his birthplace eight weeks before Indian independence; he later gave the hero of Midnight's Children a birth at the exact stroke of it.
Q 02Midnight's Children won which special 1993 prize?
Booker of Bookers
The Booker of Bookers named it the best winner of the prize's first quarter-century, twelve years after its own 1981 win; a public vote for the 40th anniversary, in 2008, chose it again.
Q 03In which English city was The Satanic Verses publicly burned in January 1989?
Bradford
Bradford's bonfire made headlines where an earlier one in Bolton had been all but ignored; India had banned the novel's import within days of its publication.
Q 04Which Iranian leader issued the fatwa against Rushdie?
Ruhollah Khomeini
Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's supreme leader, issued it in the last months of his life and died without lifting it; nine years passed before Iran's government said it would no longer try to enforce it.
Q 05On what date was the fatwa against Rushdie proclaimed on Radio Tehran?
14 February 1989
14 February 1989, Valentine's Day: Rushdie went into hiding under police protection and lived that way for the next nine years.
Q 06Rushdie's father renamed the family in honour of Ibn Rushd, the philosopher the West knows by which name?
Averroes
Averroes. The rationalist of 12th-century Muslim Spain turns up in Rushdie's 2015 novel, where he has a love affair with a jinn princess.
Q 07Which film did Rushdie say made a writer of him when he first saw it?
The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz. At ten he wrote his first story, 'Over the Rainbow', and in 1992 he published a short book about the film for the British Film Institute.
Q 08Which English public school did Rushdie attend after emigrating in 1961?
Rugby
Rugby. He later wrote that a boy there could make three mistakes, being foreign, clever and bad at games, and that he made all three.
Q 09What subject did Rushdie study at King's College, Cambridge?
History
History. He has said a course there on Muhammad and the rise of Islam is where he first read of the 'satanic verses' incident, a story he filed away for a novel.
Q 10Which product's slogan Naughty but Nice did Rushdie write as an advertising copywriter?
Cream cakes
He also coined irresistibubble for Aero and That'll do nicely for American Express.
Q 11Which chocolate bar did Rushdie sell with the made-up word 'irresistibubble' in his advertising days?
Aero
Aero. He wrote advertising copy in London through most of the 1970s, and gave it up for full-time fiction only once Midnight's Children had made his name.
Q 12What was Rushdie's debut novel, published in 1975?
Grimus
Grimus. The science-fiction fantasy flopped, and Rushdie himself later called it 'too clever for its own good'; his next novel, six years on, made him famous.
Q 13What is the name of the protagonist of Midnight's Children, born at the stroke of India's independence?
Saleem Sinai
Saleem Sinai. His midnight gift is telepathy, which he uses to convene a 'Midnight Children's Conference' of the others born in that hour.
Q 21Which band recorded a song called The Ground Beneath Her Feet with lyrics by Rushdie?
U2
U2. Bono set a song lyric from Rushdie's 1999 novel of the same name to music almost unchanged, and the band released it with the novelist credited as lyricist.
Q 22At which London stadium did Rushdie walk on stage at a rock concert in 1993, despite the fatwa?
Wembley
Wembley. He was supposed to be in hiding, yet he walked out at the singer's invitation and, as the band's bassist put it, the stadium erupted.
Q 23Which 1995 Rushdie novel is a family saga spanning a century of India's past?
The Moor's Last Sigh
The Moor's Last Sigh. Its narrator ages at twice the normal rate, and the title recalls the last Muslim king of Granada looking back at the city he had surrendered.
Q 14Rushdie's 1983 novel Shame is set in a version of which country?
Pakistan
Pakistan. The narrator insists the country 'is not Pakistan, or not quite', yet critics read the novel as an allegory of the real nation's politics.
Q 15Which Central American country was the subject of Rushdie's 1987 non-fiction book The Jaguar Smile?
Nicaragua
Nicaragua. He visited in 1986, when the Sandinista government had fallen out with Washington, and wrote up the trip as his first full-length non-fiction book.
Q 16Who are the two protagonists of The Satanic Verses, both Indian Muslim actors?
Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha
Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. Both survive a fall towards the English Channel from an exploding jet; one takes on an archangel's nature, the other grows horns and goat legs.
Q 17Beaten to the 1988 Booker Prize by Oscar and Lucinda, The Satanic Verses still won which award that year?
The Whitbread Award
The Whitbread Award. It took the Whitbread's novel-of-the-year category; within months the book was banned in many countries and its author was in hiding.
Q 18Which children's novel did Rushdie write for his son Zafar in the first years of the fatwa?
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Its dedication is an acrostic poem spelling out Zafar, the son from whom Rushdie's years in hiding kept him apart.
Q 19Which children's author called Rushdie 'a dangerous opportunist' in a 1989 letter to The Times?
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl. He argued that Rushdie must have known exactly what feelings the novel would stir among devout Muslims, and dismissed the book as sensationalism.
Q 20Rushdie's 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet retells which myth with rock stars?
Orpheus and Eurydice
Orpheus and Eurydice. The novel's Orpheus is a rock star who writes its title song after his great love, a singer, dies, and the book retells the rise of rock music along the way.
Q 24Which Mughal emperor's court is visited by a European in The Enchantress of Florence (2008)?
Akbar
Akbar. The visitor, a traveller from Florence, claims to be the emperor's long-lost relative, born to an exiled princess of his own dynasty.
Q 25Rushdie's Quichotte loves a woman he knows only from what?
Her talk show
Her talk show. The old pill salesman binges on reality TV, falls for a host he has never met and sets off to win her with an imaginary son he names Sancho.
Q 26What is the name of the woman who breathes an empire into existence in Rushdie's 2023 novel Victory City?
Pampa Kampana
Pampa Kampana. At nine she becomes the vessel of a goddess, who grants her nearly 250 years of life in which to raise the great city of Bisnaga.
Q 27What was the secret alias Rushdie used while in hiding, later the title of his 2012 memoir?
Joseph Anton
Joseph Anton. He joined the first names of Conrad and Chekhov, and bristled when his police protectors promptly shortened it to Joe.
Q 28Iran cut ties with Britain in 1989 after London refused to do what?
Denounce Rushdie and his novel
Denounce Rushdie and his novel. Tehran had given Britain a week to comply; relations resumed at a lower level in 1990, with the death sentence still in force.
Q 29What happened to Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, in 1991?
He was stabbed to death
He was stabbed to death. He was found outside his university office near Tokyo in July 1991, days after the novel's Italian translator survived a stabbing in Milan, and the murder was never solved.
Q 30Which 1970s singer-songwriter shocked fans in 1989 by appearing to endorse the death sentence on Rushdie?
Cat Stevens
Cat Stevens. By then known as Yusuf Islam, he told a British TV programme he would have hoped for 'the real thing' rather than the burning of an effigy of the author.