Portal—
Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born writer who spent years in hiding after Iran pressured Muslims to kill him over his writings, will publish a memoir about his stabbing attack in New York in 2022, book publisher Penguin Random House said on Wednesday with.
Rushdie’s new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, will be published on April 16, 2024.
“For me it was necessary to write this book: a way to come to grips with what was happening and to respond to violence with art,” Rushdie, whose public appearances have been limited since last year’s attack, said in a statement released by the publisher Explanation.
Penguin Random House UK
The cover of Salman Rushdie’s upcoming memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
Rushdie, 76, won the Freedom to Publish prize at the British Book Awards in May.
An attack on stage in August 2022 during a lecture in upstate New York left the British author blind in one eye and impaired use of one of his hands. His attacker, a Shiite Muslim American from New Jersey, has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and second-degree assault.
Almost six months after his knife attack, Rushdie published a new novel, Victory City.
Rushdie has long faced death threats in connection with his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations after its publication in 1988 because some passages were deemed blasphemous.
Rushdie spent years in hiding after Iran’s then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, a religious edict, calling on Muslims to kill him.
While Iran’s reform-minded government of President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself from the fatwa in the late 1990s, the multimillion-dollar bounty on Rushdie’s head continued to grow and the fatwa was never repealed.
Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, once said the fatwa against Rushdie was “irrevocable.”