Salman Rushdie, the acclaimed novelist and free speech advocate who was viciously attacked at a public event in New York last year, will write a memoir about the experience, his publisher, Penguin Random House, announced Wednesday. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” will be published on April 16, the publisher said. “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 in a statement.
Rushdie was attacked onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, where he was scheduled to speak about the US as a safe haven for exiled writers. As the event was about to begin, a 24-year-old man jumped onstage and stabbed Rushdie repeatedly in the face and the abdomen before members of the audience pulled the assailant away. Rushdie was gravely injured, placed temporarily on a ventilator and left blind in his right eye. The attacker has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault.
At first, Rushdie balked at the thought of writing about the stabbing, he said in an interview, as if “the attack demanded that I should write about the attack.” But he warmed to the idea, envisioning it as a counterpart to his memoir “Joseph Anton”, albeit with a very different perspective. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story,” Rushdie said. “That’s an ‘I’ story.”