Rushdie in row over editor's sack

Sir Salman Rushdie has got into a “rude” literary row, after it is claimed that he may have been involved in the sacking of magazine Granta’s editor who had rejected an essay he submitted.

In fact, the literary world is bemused after magazine publisher Sigrid Rausing recently announced that Alex Clark was stepping down as the editor of ‘Granta’.
Now, the British-Indian novelist has entered the fray to deny that he had anything to do with Clark’s departure, and he withdrew the essay ‘Notes on Sloth’, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.

But, to add salt to his wounds, an email to his agent explaining the rejection ended up in Sir Salman’s inbox.

“It is true that there was a rude email that was forwarded to me. I wasn’t particularly happy about it, but I spoke to Alex and said: ‘Look, I have no interest in forcing people to publish things they don’t want to publish,’ so I withdrew it,” he was quoted as saying. However, John Freeman, Granta’s new editor, will happily publish the essay in his first issue.

The magazine was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as The Granta, a periodical of student politics, student badinage and student literary enterprise, named after the river that runs through the town.

During the 1970s, it ran into trouble from which it was rescued by a small group of postgraduates who successfully and surprisingly relaunched it as a magazine of new writing, with both writers and their audience drawn from the world beyond Cambridge.