'Eccentricity sort of gone,' says Rushdie

Adman cometh: author recalls his early career in advertising

AUTHOR SALMAN Rushdie, who worked in advertising before becoming a Booker Prize-winning novelist, says the industry has become leaner and less eccentric.

Rushdie was in Dublin to address the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI) awards, which are run in conjunction with The Irish Times.

The winner of the Grand Prix was Irish International BBDO, the agency behind the Donegal Catch campaign.

Rushdie's part-time work as an advertising copywriter in the 1970s allowed him to pursue his chosen career as a novelist. "I thought of it as a kind of industrial sponsorship really," he said.

"It's surprising how many writers have spent some part of their early lives in advertising.

"Mr Leopold Bloom sells advertising, doesn't he? That's what he's doing on Bloomsday."

Advertising agencies used to like having "eccentric, creative people hanging around part-time", but the industry was much leaner nowadays.

Rushdie started off as a junior copywriter with a small agency which promoted a brand of cigarettes.

"That was, of course, even then problematic. At the time, unlike now, I did use to smoke. I told myself it would be hypocritical to refuse to do something I was doing myself. But I wasn't comfortable with it and was very pleased when I was able to stop."

He later refused to work on a campaign for corned beef that was being imported from South Africa. "They threatened to fire me but of course they didn't. In my experience of advertising, the people who don't care about getting fired never get fired."

Rushdie left advertising when his second book, Midnight's Children, was published in the spring of 1981. Six months later, he was awarded the Booker Prize, which "made everything much easier".

He said his early experience of the "terrifying speed" with which the advertising industry worked was a "real education" which stood him in good stead in later life.

Almost 20 years have passed since the publication of The Satanic Verses, the book which prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa that sent Rushdie into hiding.

"It's really not part of my life anymore," he insists.

He anticipates another flurry of interest around Valentine's Day next February, which will mark two decades since the issuing of the fatwa.

"Maybe after that we can finally leave the subject alone."