Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize in 1981.
 The group's then-leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was quoted as saying in an audio recording that UK's award for Rushdie was "an insult to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response
After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran

