Ian McEwan Sheltered Salman Rushdie After Fatwa Was Issued

Ian McEwan Sheltered Salman Rushdie After Fatwa Was Issued

In the folklore of English letters, the literary friendship between the four dominant voices of the modern British novel - Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes - is already the stuff of legend. That was even before we learnt that for two of them the bond even extended to offering safe haven against the threat of state-sponsored assassins.

Twenty years almost to the day after Rushdie had a death sentence declared against him by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, it has been revealed that he was offered shelter by McEwan in a cottage in the Cotswolds. There the two writers hid away shortly after the fatwa was issued on 14 February, 1989.

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