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A novelist and a faculty member

Rushdie to join university , donate archive

ATLANTA: Indian novelist Salman Rushdie will join the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta and donate his archive to the institution, marking the writer's first extended relationship with a university. He will join in the spring of 2007 and lead a graduate seminar, participate in undergraduate courses and deliver lectures during his five-year appointment.

"We'll have one of modern literature's giants on our faculty," said Emory President James Wagner. "And students will have access to his records — and the man himself. We're very, very pleased."

Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, was forced into hiding for a decade after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a 1989 order for Muslims to kill him because the book insulted Islam. In 1998, Iran declared it would not support but could not rescind the fatwa.

The archive will include notes, photographs, manuscripts, letters and two of Rushdie's early unpublished novels. It features the private journal Rushdie kept detailing his life under the fatwa, said Steve Enniss, director of Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Books Library. "He's a compulsive journal writer, and given the trajectory of his life and his life story, that journal will be of great interest to future generations," he said.

The archive will be open to the public, offering researchers and students more insight on Rushdie's inner turmoil while he was in hiding.

"While the archive will document his creative development and writing life, it will also give a sense of how he as a human being struggled during the years of the fatwa," Mr. Enniss said.

Talks between Rushdie and Emory began in 2004, when he delivered a series of lectures at the school's Decatur campus. The school's archivists are now preparing to receive the first portions of Rushdie's archive, which is split between London and New York. — AP

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