Born in 1947 in Mumbai, Salman Rushdie is the author of 14 novels including Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker prize in 1981, and has twice been named the best of all the Booker prizewinners. The 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses led Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran to issue a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination. The author now lives in New York, where he is a writer in residence at NYU. His latest novel, Quichotte, is published on 3 September.

1. Documentary
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

I saw this before Toni Morrison died and it seemed like a wonderful portrait of her, but now it feels even more significant. It’s directed by the American photographer and film-maker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who secured amazing archival footage as well as extensive access to Morrison herself, even in these last years when she wasn’t very well. I was lucky enough to know her a little bit. People sometimes think she was a very grand lady, a giant figure in literature, but actually she was very down to earth and great fun to be around – she loved dancing, for example – and the film does a good job of getting this across. It’s a beautiful piece of film-making.

2. Music
The Rolling Stones live in New Jersey

Last month, I went to see the Rolling Stones live at the MetLife stadium and it was an amazing evening. I’ve seen the Stones a lot over the years – the Observer sent me to report on the Voodoo Lounge tour at Wembley stadium in 1995 – and I’ve seen their latest show twice. It’s extraordinary that they’re still doing it and are as good as they ever were. Mick appears to have recovered from his heart procedure – he’s still zinging around the stage as fast as he ever did, while Keith remains firmly planted. When I went to see the show in London with my sons, I have never seen them so excited about going to a rock concert. It demonstrated to me that their music really has transcended all generations. It’s music that everybody can share.

3. Nonfiction
This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Suketu Mehta

This is a brief, extremely passionate polemic on the issue of immigration, which of course is a very heated subject in America, where the book was aimed at originally, as well as everywhere else. Mehta’s book is a brilliant, deliberately political rebuff to the increasingly popular view that immigrants are a problem. He talks about the history of empire and quotes someone in his family who answered the question, “But why are you here?” by replying, “We are here because you were there.” And he has a comic line about how immigrants are the creditors – we’ve come to collect the debt. It’s a very powerful book, but it also has a wit about it, which makes it very attractive. Mehta has been getting the usual hate messages and threats on social media, which seems to be the inevitable consequence of putting your head above the parapet these days.

4. Sport
The New York Yankees

I’m a pretty addicted New York Yankees fan these days and going to Yankee stadium is for me one of the great pleasures of living in New York. Apart from anything else, I really like the atmosphere at baseball games, which is rather different from football. Here, it’s very much a family occasion and very good-natured. And it’s really a good time to be a Yankees fan: they’re runaway leaders of their division and have the equal best record of the season along with the Los Angeles Dodgers. In general, it’s more fun than being a fan of Tottenham Hotspur, who I started supporting in 1961, when they won the double, but who have never won the league again. More than half a century I’ve been waiting to see it.

5. Novel
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

This is a novel I read in manuscript and is just about to be published in the US. Mengiste is an Ethiopian writer based in New York and The Shadow King, her second novel, is about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia during world war two, showing history very much from a female perspective. It’s on the edge of magic realism, but an amazing portrait of that moment in Ethiopian history. It seems to me that there is a new wave of wonderful writing from younger African women writers, from Ghana, Uganda, Zambia, Nigeria, and I think that Mengiste is very much a part of that. Her book is tightly written and has a visionary quality.

6. Film
Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespearean trilogy

An adaptation of my novel Midnight’s Children is currently being developed for Netflix. The showrunner is an Indian director called Vishal Bhardwaj, who made a trilogy of films based on Shakespeare plays. Omkara is basically Othello and the subject of an angry, jealous husband murdering his wife for an imagined infidelity fits so easily to India. In Maqbool, he brilliantly transposes the story of Macbeth into the Bombay criminal underworld. And Haider took Hamlet into Kashmir. Considering what’s happening there right now, it’s an even more important film than when it came out, because it really shows you what life has been like for people in Kashmir under the heel of the Indian security forces and military. His films are visually astonishing and I’m very interested to see how he brings all that talent to Midnight’s Children.