Acclaimed English novelist Ian McEwan
“The [encounter] came days after the fatwa was issued, when Rushdie was at the start of many years of internal exile. “I’ll never forget - the next morning we got up early,” McEwan tells the New Yorker. “He had to move on. Terrible time for him. We stood at the kitchen counter making toast and coffee, listening to the eight o’clock BBC news. He was standing right by my side and he was the lead item on the news. Hezbollah had put its sagacity and weight behind the project to kill him.”
McEwan also mentioned that before he considers any of his works ‘finished’, he has three friends read them - but the three friends mentioned above are not in the running.
“I don’t want a novelist reading my work, thank you very much!” McEwan says.
