Salman Rushdie to join Emory faculty

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Atlanta: Salman Rushdie will join the Emory University faculty and donate his archive to the institution.

The novelist's five-year appointment as a distinguished writer in residence in the English Department begins in the spring of 2007, Emory officials announced on Friday.

"Salman Rushdie is not only one of the foremost writers of our generation, he is also a courageous champion of human rights and freedom," Emory President James Wagner said.

The native of India who wrote The Satanic Verses was forced into hiding for a decade after the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a 1989 order for Muslims to kill Rushdie because the book allegedly insulted Islam.

In 1998, the Iranian government declared it would not support but could not rescind the fatwa.

Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children won Britain's Booker Prize, and was selected in 1993 as the best novel in 25 years of the Booker Prize.

This will be Rushdie's first extended relationship with a university, university officials said.

Included in the archive are Rushdie's private journals detailing life under the fatwa, as well as personal correspondence, notebooks, photographs and manuscripts of all of his writings, including two early unpublished novels.