Rushdie to stop basing characters on himself

SIR Salman Rushdie has banned himself from appearing in any of his future novels.

The author has revealed that he is frequently asked if his fictional characters were based on himself. He said two characters had been loosely autobiographical, but there would be no more."Too much of my life story has found itself into the public domain already," Sir Salman, 60, said in the speech to more than 1,000 people at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.He said he thought memoirs and personal stories had become predominant in bookshops, and fans of fiction had come to expect that novelists based their characters on actual people.

He acknowledged two of his characters had autobiographical roots – Saleem Sinai, a Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims in the 1981 novel Midnight's Children, and Malik Solanka, a former academic who moves to New York in the 2001 novel Fury.

But he insisted that those and other characters that had been inspired by real people became their own entities.

Story from The Scotsman.