Salman Rushdie To Publish ‘Knife,’ A Book About Stabbing Incident That Blinded Him In One Eye

Salman Rushdie hinted in February that he was working on a memoir about the stabbing attack last year that nearly killed him and left him blind in one eye. Now, the Booker Prize winner has announced that book will be called Knife and will be published by Penguin Random House on April 16, 2024.

Rushdie is best-known for novels such as Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, some of which have been adapted for the screen. The author told the New Yorker earlier this year that the new book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, was conceived as a sort-of sequel to his 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton.

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At first, Rushdie resisted the idea, “because it felt almost like it was being forced on me—the attack demanded that I should write about the attack.” But, he said, he found a “microscopic” look at the event engrossing.

However, unlike the third-person voice he used in Joseph Anton, Rushdie said he addresses readers directly in the new memoir: “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”

Rushdie lived for 10 years under a fatwa issued by the then Supreme leader of Iran in response to his depiction of the prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses, was the target of a planned assassination attempt by a radical Lebanese group and was placed on an Al-Qaeda hit list.

In August 2022, a 24-year-old man jumped onstage at a literary conference and slashed Rushdie repeatedly in the face, abdomen and left hand. The attack left him with about 15 stab wounds from which he has since partially recovered.

“This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,” Rushdie said today in a statement.

“Knife is a searing book, and a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in his own statement. “We are honored to publish it, and amazed at Salman’s determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves.”

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