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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Brendan O'Connor · Salman Rushdie - “It wasn’t true, I never lived in Bono’s back garden!” · 13 Jun 2026 podcast

I'm hoping that even the younger generation will shake off those shackles, you know, and just get on with doing what they have to do and what it's in them to write about.

Well, look, these are not the nicest people in the world, you know.

This is an authoritarian, fascist, repressive regime, and it has been oppressing the people of Iran for a very long time now, since 1979.

So, I have no time at all for the regime in Iran.

But,

Our own glorious leader, our own supreme leader, has not gone into this in order to liberate the people of Iran.

In fact, they're probably in a worse situation now than they were before the war.

So in general, I don't believe that you can solve the problems of the world by bombing the shit out of people.

And I don't think that this is, apologies for the four-letter word, I don't think this is a war that anybody will come out of well, including the United States.

So it's a mess.

It's a mess because it was entered into without much thought.

I mean, it seems to me pretty clear that it's really Netanyahu's war.

It's a colossal disaster for everybody.

And above all, for the people of Iran who have now had their cities bombed and their political situation at least as bad as it was before, if not worse.

Well, you know, the future is an unknown quantity.

I mean, one of the things in this book of stories that I got very interested in was the idea of the unfinished story.

Because I thought, you know, in many ways, all of us, all of us who are alive on the earth, we're all unfinished stories.

None of us knows how it's going to turn out.

None of us knows how long we've got or what the ending will be like.

And it can be a better ending than we fear, you know.

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