‘I’m over knife attack,’ says Salman Rushdie

Emma Saunders

Culture reporter at the Hay Festival

Sir Salman Rushdie says he has moved on from the knife attack which has seen his attacker jailed for attempted murder.

Hadi Matar, 27, was sentenced to 25 years last month after repeatedly stabbing Sir Salman on a New York lecture stage in 2022.

Sir Salman, who has a new book out later this year, told the Hay Festival that an “important moment” came for him when he and his wife Eliza “went back to the scene of the crime to show myself I could stand up where I fell down”.

“It will be nice to talk about fiction again because ever since the attack, really the only thing anybody’s wanted to talk about is the attack, but I’m over it.”

Sir Salman recently told Radio 4’s Today programme that he was “pleased” the man who tried to kill him had received the maximum possible prison sentence.

The Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses writer was left with life-changing injuries after the incident – he is now blind in one eye, has damage to his liver and a paralysed hand caused by nerve damage to his arm.

Last year, Sir Salman published a book titled Knife reflecting on the event, which he has described as “my way of fighting back”.

The attack came 35 years after Sir Salman’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses, which had long made him the target of death threats for its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad.

In November, the author will publish a short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, his first work of fiction to be written since the stabbing.

Security was tight for Sir Salman’s event, with sniffer dogs present and bag checks leading to a 15-minute delay.

He waved at the audience as he entered the stage and humbly gestured to them to stop applauding before joking that: “I can’t see everyone – but I can hear them.”

He said he was feeling “excellent” although there “were bits of me that I’m annoyed about, like not having a right eye. But on the whole, I’ve been very fortunate and I’m in better shape that maybe I would have expected.”

In a wide-ranging discussion, Sir Salman also touched on US politics, declaring that “America was not in great shape”.

In an apparent reference to President Donald Trump, Sir Salman spoke about “the moment of hope, that image of Barack and Michelle Obama walking down the mall in DC with the crowds around them… people dancing in the streets in New York. And to go from that to the orange moment that we live in, it’s, let’s just say, disappointing.

But he said he was still positive about the future.

“I think I suffer from the optimism disease… I can’t help thinking somehow it will be alright.”

Speaking about free speech, he said “it means tolerating people who say things you don’t like”.

He recalled a time when a film “in which I was the villain”, made around the time of the uproar over Satanic Verses, was not classified by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) “because it was in a hundred ways defamatory” but he asked them to allow its release.

“So they gave it a certificate… and nobody went, you know why? Lousy movie. And it taught me a lesson. Let it out and trust the audience. And that’s still my view.

“I think we do live in a moment when people are too eager to prohibit speech they disapprove of. That’s a very slippery slope” and warned young people “to think about it.”

When asked about the effect of AI on authors, Sir Salman said: “I don’t have Chat GPT… I try very hard to pretend it doesn’t exist. Someone asked it to write a couple of hundred words like me… it was terrible. And it has no sense of humour.”

Despite being considered one of the greatest living writers, Sir Salman joked that authors “don’t even have that much money… except the two of us (him and host Erica Wagner) and those who write about child wizards… the Taylor Swift of literature,” referring to JK Rowling.

“Good on her.”