Author Rushdie signs up with US University

British novelist Salman Rushdie is to join Emory University in Atlanta and donate his archive to the institution, it has been revealed.

Rushdie will join up next spring and participate in undergraduate courses and deliver lectures during his five-year appointment.

Emory President James Wagner said: “We’ll have one of modern literature’s giants on our faculty.

“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 the late 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.

The archive will include notes, photographs, manuscripts, letters and two of Rushdie’s early unpublished novels. It also features the private diary Rushdie kept during the fatwa years.

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

Talks between Rushdie and Emory began in 2004, when he delivered a series of lectures at the school’s Decatur, Georgia, campus.

The school’s archivists are now eagerly preparing to receive the first portions of Rushdie’s archive, which is split between London and New York.

Indian-born Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children won the prestigious Booker Prize, and was selected in 1993 as the best novel in 25 years of the Booker Prize.