British-American (US) WRITER Salman Rushdie will release a memoir entitled Knife, Tuesday (16/4). The book will contain his experience of being stabbed at an event in 2022 and how he recovered from the incident that almost took his life.
Rushdie lost one of his eyes in a knife attack carried out by someone attending a fan meeting in New York.
The Indian-born writer, who now holds US citizenship, has been the target of death threats since 1988 when his novel, Satanic Verses, was deemed insulting to Islam by Iran’s supreme leader.
In an interview with the CBS program 60 Minutes, excerpts of which were broadcast before the broadcast of the program on Sunday (14/4), Rushdie recalled a statement from a surgeon who said, “You are unlucky at first but then you get lucky.”
“I asked where I was lucky and he answered, ‘You were lucky because the person who attacked you didn’t know how to kill with a knife,'” he recalled.
The stabbing was a reminder of the fatwa against him, said Rushdie when attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023.
Also read: Charged with Attempted Murder, Rushdie’s stabber pleads not guilty
The 76-year-old writer added that the stabbing was surprising because he felt the threat to him had subsided.
“I’m just happy to be here because I almost died,” Rushdie said.
Rushdie suffered several stab wounds to the neck and stomach while attending an event in New York.
The perpetrator of Rushdie’s stabbing, a 20-year-old US citizen from Lebanon, admitted in an interview with the New York Post newspaper that he had only read two pages of Rushie’s novel but believed the author had insulted the Islamic religion. (AFP/Z-1)
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