Salman Rushdie Awarded the 2009 Carl Sandburg Literary Award and Chicago Author Patrick Somerville Presented with the 21st Century Award

April 3, 2009

Salman Rushdie

Born in Mumbai in 1947 and educated in England, Salman Rushdie shot to literary fame with Midnight’s Children, a magic-realist saga that weaves the story of a narrator, born at the moment of India’s independence in 1947, with the subcontinent’s modern history.  That novel was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and the “Best of the Booker” in both 1993 and 2008.  Rushdie is the author of nine other novels, including The Enchantress of Florence; The Satanic Verses – winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel in 1988; Haroun and the Sea of Stories – winner of the Writers Guild of Britain Award; The Moor’s Last Sigh—another Whitbread Prize Best Novel winner; The Ground Beneath Her Feet—a Commonwealth Prize winner; Fury—a New York Times Notable Book winner, and Shalimar the Clown—a Time Book of the Year. 

Patrick Somerville

Patrick Somerville’s first novel, The Cradle, was published in March of 2009 received rave reviews in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, andthe Chicago Reader.  Time Out Chicago named Trouble, his book of short stories, 2006's Best Book by a Chicago Author.  A native of Green Bay, Wisconsin, Somerville has taught creative writing and English at Cornell (where he earned his MFA), Auburn State Correctional Facility, and the Graham School in Chicago.  He is currently serving as the Simon Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

Past winners of the prestigious Carl Sandburg Literary Award include David McCullough, Robert Caro, Joyce Carol Oates, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, David Mamet, Nikki Giovanni and Tom Wolfe.