Thursday, March 28Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

Author: Helena Keeble

Rushdie and ‘the Joker’
Culture & Literature, Literature

Rushdie and ‘the Joker’

On 23 October, the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre hosted the novelist Salman Rushdie in conversation with Erica Wagner on his thirteenth novel, The Golden House. Rushdie is a British Indian novelist, well known for his 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children, which won both the Man Booker Prize during its year of publication. Wagner opened the conversation, pondering on the character, ‘the Joker’ in The Golden House, asking why Rushdie didn’t call him Donald Trump. Rushdie wittily responded, ‘I didn’t want the name of the 45thpresident to be in my book. I thought it would pollute it in some way, and so I thought, in a deck of playing cards there’s only two cards that are unusual to play. One of them is the Trump, and the other is the Joker’, to which the audience broke into ...