NEW YORK. Seriously injured last year in an ambush, Salman Rushdie will write a memoir about the event, which left him blind in one eye. This was announced today by the Penguin Random House publishing house which publishes the books by the Anglo-Indian writer of Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” will be released on April 16, 2024, the publisher announced: «Writing this book was a necessity for me: a way of appropriating the narrative of what is success and to respond to violence with art,” commented Rushdie. The writer was attacked on August 12, 2022 on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution, a summer community for the arts in upstate New York, where he was preparing to speak about the United States as a place of refuge for writers in exile. As the event was about to begin, a young man of 24, Hadi Matar, went on stage and repeatedly stabbed Rushdie in the face and abdomen: only the intervention of members of the audience managed to prevent the consequences from being worse. Rushdie was however seriously injured; admitted to hospital he was temporarily intubated and has since lost the sight in his left eye.
The ambush overlapped with a life spent for years under the threat of the fatwa (and a bounty of 2.5 million dollars on his head) decreed in 1989 against the writer by the Iranian ayatollahs after the publication of Satanic Verses.
For almost a decade Rushdie lived in hiding, an experience addressed in a previous memoir, Joseph Anton, published in 2012 under the pseudonym he adopted in that period of fear in homage to the writers Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. The fatwa was revoked in 1998 and since then Rushdie has become an active member of the New York literary community, at the forefront of the movement for freedom of expression. Initially, the idea of writing about the ambush of which he had been the victim had not gone to his liking: but then he changed his mind and imagined Knife as a counterpoint to Joseph Anton, but from a different perspective: «When someone sticks a knife in your body, it’s a first-person story.” Rushdie has written 15 novels so far, of which the latest, Victory City, finished before the ambush, came out last February.