In Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie recounts the near-fatal attack on him in vivid detail

Salman Rushdie—the celebrated author of 'Midnight's Children', 'Satanic Verses' and 'Victory City'—survived a brutal knife attack on August 12, 2022. Rushdie had been on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, when Hadi Matar, 24, stabbed him more than 12 times. Nearly two years since the attack, Salman Rushdie has written about that horrific incident in a new memoir: Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder.

Why did he write a book about what must have been a difficult incident to recall and write about in vivid detail? Rushdie said on the Fresh Air podcast by US's National Public Radio (NPR) that the idea was to reclaim agency and control—to go from being a writer who was attacked to someone writing about the attack.

In the 46-minute interview on Fresh Air, Rushdie spoke about how there was nothing he could have done really to stop the attacker. Hadi Matar was a 24-year-old with a knife, he said. And he, Rushdie, a 75-year-old without one. After the first knife stab went through his hand, Rushdie said he froze. Despite years of living in anticipation of an attack like this after the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him in February 1989, when the attack came, it surprised everyone.

Did he think he was going to make it? Did he pray when the attack happened? Rushdie said the thought that went through his head at the time was that it "really was a lot of blood". He said he was lying in a "lake" of his own blood that was expanding every minute.