Salman Rushdie is the Booker prize-winning author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, a newly minted knight, and the recipient of a death sentence. He's better known to tabloid readers as the grizzled old man who was once married to Padma Lakshmi.

A native of Bombay, Rushdie was educated at an English boarding school and attended Cambridge before working as an advertising copywriter. He published his first novel, Grimus, in 1975, and then made a big splash with his follow-up, 1980's Midnight's Children—about children born on the cusp of India's independence from colonial rule who possess special powers—which won England's Booker prize. Since then, he's amassed an oeuvre of nine novels as well as several story collections and works of non-fiction. Rushdie's writing attracts admiration and disdain in equal measure, with some critics lauding his imagination and exuberance but others finding his books pretentious and impenetrable. A running joke about Midnight's Children is that no one has ever actually finished it.

Rushdie was forced into hiding on Valentine's Day 1989, when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa—a death sentence—against him for his irreverent depiction of the prophet Mohammed in The Satanic Verses. For the next decade, the author was forced to live in hiding under the protection of the British police. In 1998, the Iranian government promised that the fatwa would not be pursued, but more recently a number of the country's religious leaders have reaffirmed it, and the author's 2007 British knighthood has inflamed matters: The speaker of the Iranian parliament decried England for the move, and a spokesperson for Pakistan's foreign ministry also criticized the honor. On a lighter note, the fatwa was fodder for an episode of Seinfeld, in which the character of Kramer thinks he's run into Rushdie, using the pseudonym "Sal Bass," at a health club.

Rushdie has had nearly as many wives as books published. His first marriage was in 1976 to an Englishwoman, Clarissa Luard, the mother of his adult son Zafar. He then married American writer Marianne Wiggins, divorced her, and married Elizabeth West, with whom he has a young son, Milan. Until July 2007, he was married to wife No. 4, Padma Lakshmi, the much younger model and Top Chef host. [Image via Getty]