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British author Salman Rushdie will join the faculty at Atlanta's Emory University next year and will donate his archive to the school's library, it was announced Friday.
Emory officials said the novelist will begin his five-year appointment as Distinguished Writer in Residence in Spring 2007 and his course each year will last four weeks.
"Salman Rushdie is not only one of the foremost writers of our generation, he is also a courageous champion of human rights and freedom," Emory president James Wagner said in a statement.
Rushdie in 1989 became the subject of a death edict issued by Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini over his book "The Satanic Verses", which was deemed insulting to Islam.
The fatwa forced the Indian-born author into hiding for a decade.
Rushdie won Britain's Booker Prize in 1981 with his second novel "Midnight's Children". The book was selected in 1993 as the best novel in 25 years of the Booker Prize.
Emory University said his appointment at the institution marks his first extended relationship with a university.
The archive he is to donate to the university will consist of his private journals detailing life under the fatwa, or death edict, as well as personal correspondence, notebooks, photographs and manuscripts of all of his writings, including two early unpublished novels.
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AFP 062146 GMT 10 06
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