Salman Rushdie is one of the few authors with a truly global circle of readers, this can partically be attributed to the controversy around his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). A whole list of his novels have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Midnight's Children (1981) in fact won the ‘Booker of Bookers' from a selection of 25 former winners. In his work Rushdie is fascinated by the way in which an individual's personal background forms a filter for the ‘reality' they experience. Rushdie himself has always felt like a ‘bastard child of history' due to his British-Indian background.