Salman Rushdie to finally lift veil on living with the threat of fatwa
Ben Hoyle , from: The Australian , July 19, 2010 

Salman Rushdie is working on perhaps the most anticipated memoir of all: The story of his decade in hiding from Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa.
No other leading writer has endured an experience remotely comparable with Rushdie's life under the Iranian leader's death threat, and the episode now stands as a grim turning point in the relationship between Islam and the West.
Rushdie, 63, announced this year that he would tell his side of the story in the future.
He confirmed last week that the moment had arrived. "I am writing it now," he said at an event organised by the literary magazine Granta. "I found it kind of annoying that other people kept offering versions of it that were all bullshit."

On Valentine's Day 1989 Khomeini called for the death of everyone involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie's allegedly blasphemous fourth novel.
For the next nine years he was driven underground, guarded round the clock by Special Branch officers at an estimated cost of £11 million.
He is believed to have lived in 30 different locations but his exact whereabouts and activities for most of that time are a mystery.

Around the world the feelings of hatred, fear and condemnation stirred up by the fatwa hastened the emergence of radical Islamism and the erosion of free speech.
British bookshops were bombed. A would-be assassin accidentally blew himself up in a London hotel room; a Norwegian publisher was shot; the novel's Japanese translator was stabbed to death in Tokyo; 37 people died in an arson attack in Turkey aimed at a Turkish translator.
Full piece at The Australian.