Salman Rushdie
speaker
469 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 13 Jun
Salman Rushdie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Because there's stuff I know about, there's stuff I don't know about.
But what I do know about is the art of literature.
And that's what I'm trying to give my energy to now.
Oh, you know, I think it's under threat all right.
I mean, I can't speak for Ireland, but certainly in the United States, I've never known a time
when the powers that be were so anxious to silence criticism and opposition.
I think it does come from, I mean, to some extent, I think if I was a young writer starting out now, I would feel a measure of pressure about what it was okay to write about and what it was not okay to write about.
And that was a kind of pressure that people in my generation never felt.
We thought we could write about any damn thing we wanted.
But now I think there is a kind of what's okay and what's not okay.
and pressure to kind of stay in your lane.
But I think if we get to that situation where people can only write about their own personal experience of the world, that's the death of the novel right there, because the whole point about literature is that it goes beyond the artist.
It goes outwards into the world.
And we have to give ourselves the freedom to write about anything we want.
And the only question is, do we do it well or badly?
If we do it badly, then people can for sure call us out.
But don't tell me what I'm allowed to write because I ain't going to listen to that.
Yeah, they do it to themselves.
I think there is a bit of that around.
You know, I'm hoping that the younger, I mean, writers are quite bloody minded folks, you know.
Showing 221–240 of 469 · page 12 of 24
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