Salman Rushdie | $15 Million

Salman Rushdie is a novelist born of British-Indian descent. His work combines magical realism with historical fiction. Among his most famous books are the novels Midnight’s Children, as well as the very controversial, The Satanic Verses. He was born in Mumbai, India, to a businessman and school teacher. He attended a private school in Bombay before moving to a boarding school in England. He earned his Master’s Degree at King’s College in the University of Cambridge.

He published his first book, Grimus, in 1975 and his second one, Midnight’s Children, in 1981 — both were commercial successes. Midnight’s won the Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), and was also awarded Best of the Bookers in 1993 and in 2008. Although his book The Satanic Verses got banned in a in a lot of countries, his earnings from this and his other books gave him a net worth of approximately $15 million.