Moor on Rushdie

Ok, a terrible pun.  However, I will use it as an excuse to link to a fairly old interview where Rushdie is discussing The Moor's Last Sigh.

One issue that was talked about a bit on Monday was how Rushdie is primarily a writer but also a public intellectual, and I did a bit of poking around on Youtube and found quite a few interviews where Rushdie is talking about his own writing or contemporary political events.

For instance, here is a panel with Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy talking about the 50th anniversary of India's independence.

While he only reads for a very short time (under 5 minutes), I was excited to find this interview about The Golden House, where Homi Bhabha is the interviewer.

In terms of more current events, I could not find any examples of Rushdie reading from his latest novel, Quichotte.  He seems to prefer the long-interview format to promote it.  As it happens, here is Rushdie talking to Marlon James about the book for an hour (with some highlights* transcribed below the video).  Perhaps even more exciting is that the AGO has posted Monday's interview on Facebook for those that couldn't get tickets.  (You might want to jump on this, since I don't know how long this will stay up.)

This is the longest and most in-depth interview with Rushdie I could find, and I have to admit I have not watched the entire three(!) hours.  What is interesting is that he spends a fair bit of time talking about The Satanic Verses and what he was up to with this novel, whereas in more recent interviews he is definitely not interested in talking about the fatwa any longer, except obliquely.

* Rushdie mentions that he interviewed Toni Morrison around the time that her novel, Jazz, was published.  This appears to be a print interview, rather than a video-taped interview, unfortunately.  The interview was initially published in Brick (issue 36), but it is much easier to track down in the book Toni Morrison: Conversations.  I should be able to pick this up on my next trip to Robarts.