Salman Rushdie in conversation

Vanessa Guignery (1, 2)

1 IHRIM - Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités
2 ITEM – Joyce - Équipe James Joyce et le Modernisme anglophone

This interview with Salman Rushdie took place in May 2017 in Lyon, France, when he answered the questions of students from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and from high schools and universities in Lyon, Paris and Nantes. The novels discussed include Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children and Shalimar the Clown. Rushdie reflects on the flexibility of the word “story” for him, on his attraction for cities and on his relation to magic realism and Latin American writers like García Márquez. He talks about the children’s books that have inspired him (The Arabian Nights and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books) as well as the great books he has learned from (Don Quijote, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses). He also refers to the comic dimension of some of his books, the joys and difficulties of translation and his experience as a screenplay writer.

Mots clés: Salman Rushdie; interview; fantasy; magic realism; translation

Domaines: Littératures

Vanessa Guignery. Salman Rushdie in conversation. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2017, pp.1-16. ⟨10.1080/17449855.2017.1380070⟩. ⟨halshs-01703816⟩