Antonia Fraser on her hero, Salman Rushdie, winner of the 2014 PEN Pinter prize

Harold Pinter, my late husband, admired Salman Rushdie’s work enormously, long before he met him. He thought Midnight’s Children was a wonderful book (although his favourite was The Satanic Verses, which he read, incidentally, long before the troubles). We first met Salman in February 1982, at a protest outside the Polish embassy mounted by PEN in favour of Solidarity. Afterwards, we all went to the pub and a real friendship grew, which was very important to Harold.