Salman Rushdie said he would like to be talked about for his books rather than as the “free speech Barbie”.
In a conversation with George Packer of The Atlantic at the New Orleans Book Festival on Friday, the British-Indian novelist looked back at the 2022 knife attack that nearly killed him and left him blind in one eye, and the first work of fiction he had written since.
“I don't feel symbolic, you know. I feel actual. I feel like I'm a working writer trying to make his work,” he said. “When you’ve written 23 books, it’s a little frustrating to be known not even for a book, but for something that happened to a book in 1989 – when that was my fifth published book and this is my 23rd. Can we please talk about books? I keep trying to say.”
Rushdie was attacked by 27-year-old New Jersey resident Hadi Matar at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in August 2022.
After being stabbed multiple times in a frenzied 27-second attack, Rushdie was hospitalised for six weeks, lost the sight in one eye and the partial use of a hand.
Though Matar didn’t reveal a clear motive for the attack, it was widely believed to have stemmed from a fatwa issued by Iran’s then-supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against Rushdie over his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
In the wake of the fatwa, Rushdie had spent the better part of a decade hiding in London after the book’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death.
Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted murder in May 2025.
Talking about his memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which explores the attack and its aftermath, the author said it was “almost unbearable to write”, and “almost unbearable not to write”.
“It’s a love story. It’s a story of recovery. It’s a story about what use art has in the face of a trauma,” he said.
After finishing Knife, Rushdie said a “door in my head opened and the stories came back”. His new short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, was published in November 2025.
The author explained that he had been worried the “trauma and just the shocking impact of what happened” would leave him unable to write fiction anymore.
Despite not wanting to be known as a defender of free speech, Rushdie spoke about where he thought censorship primarily came from.
“Historically, attacks on free expression have come from the rich and powerful, and the religious,” he said. “That’s always been there, and of course, political repression. We live in it every day these days.”
“Coming from a more liberal background, there now seems to be a different kind of problem. One is self-censorship, I think, particularly if you’re a young writer now. I think there’re young writers now who are worried about what they're allowed to write about,” he added.
“Without appropriation there is no art. If you can only write about the thing that you are, that’s such a tiny piece of human experience that you run out of it quite quickly.”
‘Don’t google the Beckhams!’: How to read more, according to Britain’s top authors
Richard Osman among authors to publish ‘empty book’ in protest of AI using their work
Emma Thompson, Gisèle Pelicot and Dawn French among Hay Festival 2026 headliners
Bible sales at their highest in almost three decades
Gavin and Stacey star Ruth Jones shortlisted for author of the year award
ACOTAR author Sarah J Maas announces two new books after fans’ five-year wait
