Salman Rushdie is writing a book about being stabbed on stage in New York last year, an attack which left him without sight in one eye, the author told the Hay literary festival.
“I’m trying to write a book about the attack on me – what happened and what it means, not just about the attack, but around it,” he said in a pre-recorded zoom appearance.
“It will 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 … So I just have to deal with it.”
Rushdie spent six weeks in hospital after the knife attack. As well as his loss of vision, injuries to a hand have left him with a lack of feeling in some fingertips, which makes typing difficult.
The man suspected of stabbing Rushdie, Hadi Matar, has been charged with attempted murder.
Rushdie told the Hay audience he was “doing OK” and was “gratified” by the positive response to his latest novel, Victory City, which was completed before the attack and published after it.
“I never take anything for granted,” he said. “Most people seem to like the book and that means a lot.”
Rushdie was awarded this year’s Hay festival medal for prose for Victory City. In a panel discussion on the novel, Margaret Atwood said the book “read like a fairytale – and then less like a fairytale and more like the Wars of the Roses”. The Turkish novelist Elif Shafak said it was a “blend of the harshest politics and reality with immense imagination.”
Douglas Stuart, who won the Booker prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, said it was like a “wonderful tapestry” and there was an “enormous richness to his work that is unrivalled”.
At the time of the attack on Rushdie last year, the novelist had lived without round-the-clock security for two decades after he was forced into hiding for nearly 10 years when a fatwa was issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.
Amid claims that the novel was anti-Islamic, there were widespread protests. Rushdie faced death threats and the then-Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for Rushdie’s murder, placing a $3m (£2.5m) bounty on the author’s head.
Earlier at Hay, the artist Tracey Emin described the horror of her diagnosis of bladder cancer and subsequent surgery to remove her bladder, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, part of her colon, urethra and part of her vagina.
She had accepted she was going to die. “Meeting death didn’t worry me,” she said, but three years later she was “really, really happy”, more creative, and a “better artist and a better human being”.
She said the former prime minister David Cameron had been a strong supporter of the arts but since he stepped down, the Tories “have fucked the arts over totally. And Labour has never really liked art.”
