Salman Rushdie recalls stabbing in first memoir since near-fatal attack
British-American author Salman Rushdie recounts the 2022 stabbing at a public event that left him blind in one eye in "Knife", his first memoir since the near-fatal attack, which hits English language bookstores on Tuesday. The French edition, "Le Couteau", will be released Thursday.
The Indian-born author, a naturalised US citizen based in New York, has faced death threats since his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" was declared blasphemous by Iran's supreme leader, making Salman Rushdie a global symbol of free speech.
But after years remaining unscathed, a knife-wielding assailant jumped on stage at an arts gathering in rural New York state and stabbed Rushdie multiple times in the neck and abdomen. He ultimately lost his right eye.
“At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm,” Rushdie writes in the opening paragraph of the memoir “Knife”, published Tuesday.
At just over 200 pages, “Knife” is a brief work in the canon of Rushdie, among the most exuberant and expansive of contemporary novelists.
“Knife” is also his first memoir since “Joseph Anton”, the 2012 publication in which he looked back on the fatwa, or death decree, issued more than 20 years earlier by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini following the publication of “The Satanic Verses”.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)
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