Salman Rushdie in Running for Nobel?

LONDON, (IANS) – Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed earlier this year shortly before giving a lecture in the US, is among the favorites to win this year’s Nobel prize for literature, according to bookmakers, a media report said.

This year’s prize will be announced on October 6, and it goes to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.

The award is decided on by the Swedish Academy, a group of 18 people who consist of Swedish writers, linguists, literary scholars, historians, and prominent jurists.

The prize is the most prestigious literary award in the world.

Betting site Nicer Odds, which compares odds from several bookmakers, showed that the lowest odds for Rushdie winning were 13/2.

If he wins, the 75-year-old British American would be the first Indian-born writer to win the award since Rabindranath Tagore took the prize in 1913, The Guardian reported.

The attack on Rushdie took place 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to assassinate the author a few months after ‘The Satanic Verses’ was published. Although Iran has since distanced itself from the fatwa, it has never been formally lifted.

Just two weeks before the attack, Rushdie had told the German news magazine Stern that his life was “very normal again”.