I felt a bit in that position, yearning for a world that I couldn’t regain.Īnd Conrad wrote quite a bit about secret police and spies and so on, but I also remembered a phrase in the novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ which struck me a lot. Chekhov, especially in his plays, is such a great artist of loneliness and isolation, people wanting to be somewhere that they can’t be, the Three Sisters yearning for a Moscow that they can’t go to. Then I came to think that that odd combination of Conrad and Chekhov had something to said about the condition that I was in. My question is, to put it bluntly: if I were standing on the mountain next to Muhammad, would I see the angel? After fooling around with these things I wrote down Joseph and Anton and thought that could actually be somebody’s name – it sounded plausible. Some weren’t very successful – Marcel Beckett? Not very convincing. Eventually I thought I could just make combinations of names of writers I liked. In the supermarket they could have accidentally said, “So and so sent me to get some cheese,” and thus blow the protection. The main reason was so that my protection team could train themselves not to use my real name by mistake.

The British police told me to choose a name – and to try not to make it an Indian name, because that would be too obvious. Why did you choose Joseph Anton as the alias you’d be hiding under for the nearly 10 years that the fatwa hung over you? We decided to share excerpts from this moment of live literature with our readers, as an homage to both a great festival and great intellectual who in October celebrated the 25th anniversary of the publication of his once-deemed-blasphemous The Satanic Verses. In the talk that follows – conducted by his German translator Bernhard Robben – Rushdie reconfirms his reputation as a witty, generous and captivating speaker. Rushdie’s prose is limpid, the story gripping, his delivery engaging.

The 90 minutes that follow don’t disappoint. Rushdie is welcomed on stage with a fervour usually reserved for huge stars.

Salman rushdie alias