Celebrated India-born author Salman Rushdie is thinking of penning a children' book and may start work on his new novel later this month.
"I'm thinking of writing a children's book. My younger son is 11, which is the age my older son (Zafar) was when I wrote a book for him, so now Milan
is saying: 'Where's my book'?" the controversial author told 'The Guardian' newspaper in an interview published on Friday.
Rushdie, 61, said he would start writing his new novel later this month.
His Midnight's Children, a novel based on India's birth was on Thursday declared the winner of the 'Best of the Booker' title, 27 years after its publication.
Rushdie said "I wasn't confident at all when I wrote Midnight's Children. It was all just a trick. My first novel (Grimus, from 1975) had done less than zero and had been trashed. I had four or five other unpublishable novels too, so I felt like a failed writer. At the time, Ian (McEwan), Martin (Amis) and Julian (Barnes) had had great successes, leaving me at the starting grid."
Midnight's Children has had an afterlife; younger Indian novelists such as Booker-winner Kiran Desai and Rana Dasgupta have been profoundly influenced by his novel, he argued.
"And then there's Amit Chaudhari. Barely a week goes by without Amit taking a swipe at Midnight's Children. So it has been influential even among those who hate it."
Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses' made him the world's most celebrated, if beleaguered, novelist. It was deemed to be so hostile to Islam that it provoked Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a 'fatwa' in 1988 calling for Rushdie to be killed. There was a failed attempt on his life, and others linked to the book were attacked, among them his Japanese translator, who was stabbed to death by, what Rushdie believed, Iranian terrorists who entered Japan from China.