Midnight's Children prize winners in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary. In 2003, the novel was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels". It was also added to the list of Great Books of the 20th Century, published by Penguin Books. "Midnight's Children" is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily, after the independence and partition of India. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment when India became an independent country. He was born with telepathic powers, as
Salman Rushdie at the last minute after the government pressured the festival to stop it. Rushdie returned to India to address a conference in Delhi on 16 March 2012. In 2010 Anwar al-Awlaki published an Al-Qaeda hit list in "Inspire" magazine, including Rushdie along with other figures claimed to have insulted Islam, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, cartoonist Lars Vilks and three "Jyllands-Posten" staff members: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose. The list was later expanded to include Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier, who was murdered in a terror attack on "Charlie Hebdo" in Paris, along with 11 other people. After the attack, Al-Qaeda