Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, about being stabbed last year, will be published on 16 April next year, Penguin Random House has announced.
The Indian-born British-American author, who survived a knife attack in 2022, revealed he was working on a new book at the Hay literary festival in June. He told the Hay audience via a pre-recorded Zoom appearance that it would be “a relatively short book, a couple of hundred pages”.
“It’s not the easiest book in the world to write, but it’s something I need to get past in order to do anything else. I can’t really start writing a novel that’s got nothing to do with this,” he said. “So I just have to deal with it.”
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder will recount the author’s experience of surviving the attempt on his life. It is “a searing book”, according to Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, and “a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. We are honoured to publish it, and amazed at Salman’s determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves.”
Rushdie said: “This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art.”
The 76-year-old is the acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels, including Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses. He also published a previous memoir, Joseph Anton, in 2012, which recounts his time in hiding after multiple threats to his life following the publication of The Satanic Verses. The 1988 novel was banned in Iran as blasphemous, and a fatwa calling for his death was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then the supreme leader of Iran.
Thirty-three years after the fatwa was issued, Rushdie, who has lived in the US since 2000, was stabbed repeatedly while on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state where he was due to deliver a lecture. Afterwards, the writer remained in hospital for six weeks. He lost vision in one eye and feeling in some fingertips. The man suspected of stabbing Rushdie, Hadi Matar, has been charged with attempted murder.
Rushdie’s most recent book, the novel Victory City, was published earlier this year, but it was written before the attack. Knife will be the first book he has written since the events last year.
The author has been shortlisted for the Booker prize for fiction seven times, and won it in 1981 for his second novel, Midnight’s Children, a magical realist story about the partition of India. The novel also went on to win the “Booker of Bookers” twice: once in 1993 and again in 2008, in celebration of the prize’s 25th and 40th anniversaries.
