"It's my story, and at some point, it does need to be told. That point is getting closer, I think," he told reporters at Emory University in Atlanta, where an exhibition of his personal correspondence, notebooks, photographs, drawings and manuscripts is set to open on Friday. "When [the archive material] was in cardboard boxes and dead computers, it would have been very, very difficult, but now it's all organised," he said.

Last year marked 20 years since the Iranian leader called for Rushdie's execution, saying that his novel The Satanic Verses insulted Islam, Mohammed and the Qur'an. The edict, which followed street protests and book burnings across the Muslim world, forced Rushdie to go into hiding under police protection for almost 10 years.

Rushdie was pointedly not joining in the applause for author Vikas Swarup and director Danny Boyle. "The movie piles impossibility on impossibility," he said in a lecture at Emory University in Atlanta, raising questions over how the characters end up at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles from where they were in the previous scene, and how they manage to get their hands on a gun in India.

And it wasn't only the film which came in for a slating, with Swarup's 2005 novel Q&A, on which Slumdog Millionaire is based, also criticised by the Booker prizewinner. "The problem with this adaptation begins with the work being adapted," he went on.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Rushdie wasn't too enamoured of two other Oscar winners adapted from books. The Reader is "[a] leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability", he told the lecture, while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button "doesn't finally have anything to say". The Reader is based on Bernhard Schlink's Holocaust novel, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is adapted from an F Scott Fitzgerald short story.

Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence was simply not a good enough book to make it past the longlist stage of this year's Booker prize, according to the chair of judges, Michael Portillo. To add insult to the double Booker of Booker winner's injured pride, Portillo added that the judges didn't even spend that much time discussing it.

"I can say that the discussions we had about Salman Rushdie, as with all the other books, was a discussion about the book and not about the author. It was about the merits of the book," he told guardian.co.uk after the press conference at which the shortlist was announced. "In the opinion of these five people taken together, Salman Rushdie's was not one of the top six books for us. We didn't have a huge debate about it."

"I am very disappointed to hear that my publishers, Random House, have cancelled another author's novel, apparently because of their concerns about possible Islamic reprisals," Rushdie said. "This is censorship by fear and it sets a very bad precedent indeed." The withdrawal of Jones's book has renewed the debate over self-censorship in the treatment of Islam.

Sir Salman Rushdie is threatening to sue a former police bodyguard who has written a book about protecting the author while he was in hiding. The award-winning writer is furious at the way he has been portrayed by Ron Evans in On Her Majesty's Service. Mr Evans was among the officers who guarded Sir Salman after The Satanic Verses led to death threats in 1989.

The author told BBC News the claims were "a bunch of lies" and he was seriously considering legal action. Sir Salman said the book was defamatory and is demanding that the offending chapters be removed. The Booker Prize-winning author received police protection after a fatwa was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's spiritual leader.

Mr Evans worked as a driver in the protection unit. He was also a bodyguard for John Major and other high-profile figures. I was never locked in a cupboard nor was I suicidal - none of these things happened, said Sir Salman Rushdie In the book, he claims Sir Salman was nicknamed "Scruffy" and was once locked in a cupboard because he irritated his protection officers. They then all went to the pub. He wrote: "When they were suitably refreshed they came back and let him out." He also claims the author charged officers around £ 40 a night to stay in his home and would also ask for money if they drank his wine. In the memoirs, Mr Evans writes: "We were paying, or rather, the taxpayer was paying Rushdie to protect him!"

Sir Salman replied: "He's made up a whole bunch of lies. I became extremely friendly and fond of the police officers who protected me. They were extremely scrupulous and would never behave so cruelly to me, get drunk on duty or do anything else he has said. At the end of my nine years of protection, they even held a party for me. He has not checked his facts. I was never locked in a cupboard nor was I suicidal. None of these things happened."

"His record is toast," Rushdie crowed, in a letter to the Guardian. Gluck started the controversy, questioning whether Rushdie could possibly have signed as many books as he had claimed, or whether he had just scribbled his initials.

Gluck's claimed record is 1,001 copies in 59 minutes, set at a wine warehouse in London in 1998. Gluck achieved this with the help of a team of three men, one fetching the copies, one opening them at the blank page, and another whisking the signed copies away. Rushdie said he had signed 1,000 copies, on his most recent tour promoting the Enchantress of Florence, in a books warehouse in Nashville in 57 minutes.

Rushdie insisted: "Let me be clear: I did not initial the books, but signed my full name." The Best of Booker winner agreed that a crack team of book-handlers is essential. "I did have the support of experienced staff at Ingrams book distributors in Nashville, (and at many other US bookstores), who will confirm that among the fastest present-day signers of books are President Jimmy Carter, the novelist Amy Tan, and myself," he said.

I had the original idea for it I think as long ago as 1999, when I first wrote out to myself a kind of note, which I often do with ideas that I think might go somewhere. It can sometimes be a paragraph and sometimes ten pages. In this case, I think the note was about a dozen pages, sketching out why I thought it was an interesting idea -- as a reminder, because I was writing another book at the time. The strange thing is that almost all the actual plot that I wrote down originally I subsequently ditched. [LAUGHS] But the thing at the heart of it -- finding a fictional device that would allow me to bring together the Florence of the Medici and the India of the Mughals (two worlds which in real history have very little contact with each other in this period) -- that I have held onto from back then.

You know, I am an historian by training: that was my university subject [at Cambridge].

*****

As a result, I knew enough history to know that these were uniquely great moments in both India and Europe -- they were pinnacle moments of both cultures. So I thought it would be interesting to push them together and see what happened. That's the bit that I kept in my head.

Salman Rushdie slipped into Buckingham Palace yesterday to receive the knighthood that had angered many parts of the Muslim world when it was announced last year that the Queen would knight the controversial author.

In a break with normal procedure, it was not announced in advance that the 61-year-old Rushdie would be among those knighted. The palace wouldn't comment on whether his name had been withheld for security reasons. Security has been a major concern for Rushdie since 1989, when Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for his death, accusing him of blasphemy against the Muslim world in the 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

The edict forced Indian-British Rushdie to live underground, protected by British special agents, until the sentence was finally withdrawn in 1998. "This is, as I say, an honour not for any specific book but for a very long career in writing, and I'm happy to see that recognized," Rushdie said after the ceremony.

He married Lakshmi, a former model born in 1970 in India, in 2004. She was his fourth wife and the couple had no children. "Salman Rushdie has agreed to divorce his wife, Padma Lakshmi, because of her desire to end their marriage," spokeswoman Jin Auh said in a statement on his behalf. "He asks that the media respect his privacy at this difficult time," the statement said.

Rushdie hit the headlines two weeks ago when he was selected for knighthood by Britain's Queen Elizabeth, provoking renewed anger among some Muslims in Iran and Pakistan. When the Indian-born Rushdie started his romance with the model more than 20 years his junior, the British tabloids made much of their differences in age and intellectual stature.

But Rushdie always defended his wife. "Anyone who's met Padma knows she's as intelligent as they come," he told The Times of London in a 2005 interview. "But, you know, it's not supposed to be permitted to be gorgeous and really smart and also very nice."

"It feels very odd to see newspaper articles saying 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Why Do Beautiful Women Love Ugly Men?"' he said in the interview. "But at this stage, I'm kind of resigned to it at -- as you say -- pushing 60." Rushdie shot to fame in 1981 when his second novel, "Midnight's Children," a magic-realist exploration of Indian history, won the Booker Prize. The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's supreme religious leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict in 1989 that called on Muslims to kill Rushdie because of perceived blasphemy in his fourth novel, "The Satanic Verses."

Rushdie responded Monday to an Associated Press query that asked if he had been urged by British authorities not to say anything because of security concerns or whether he had considered not accepting the honour. "The British authorities have not asked me to do or not do anything," Rushdie wrote in an e-mail. "I have simply chosen to remain out of this storm for the moment. And nobody is turning anything down."

*****

Iran's late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a 1989 fatwa, or religious edict, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie because "The Satanic Verses" allegedly insulted Islam. The threat forced Rushdie to live in hiding for a decade. Muslims have demonstrated against the knighthood in London, Pakistan and Iran. On Monday, top Indian Muslim clerics also criticized Rushdie and British officials. The Ulema Council of India said the decision to honour the Indian-born Rushdie reflects the anti-Islamic attitude of the British government.

"Salman Rushdie is a detested figure among Muslims. The British government has hurt Muslim feelings by honouring a person who is facing a fatwa for blasphemous writings," Maulana Abul Hasan of the Ulema council said.