Author Sir Salman Rushdie has described the moment he was stabbed on stage in New York state in August 2022.
The acclaimed Indian-born British novelist, 76, whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, had been due to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed the stage and stabbed him.
He suffered severe, life-changing injuries in the attack.
In an interview with American journalist Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes on CBS, which will air on Sunday, he read an excerpt from his upcoming memoir that recounts the ordeal.
“In the corner of my right eye, the last thing my right eye would ever see,” Rushdie said, reading from the book.
“I saw the man in black running towards me, down the right hand side of the seating area.
“Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low - a squat missile.
“I confess I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way.
“So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was: ‘So it’s you. Here you are’.”
He told Cooper: “It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time, back into that distant past in order to kill me.”
In another teaser, uploaded to the 60 Minutes social media channel, Rushdie talked about his survival feeling like a miracle.
“It feels like a miracle”, he said.
“And I certainly don’t feel that some hand reached down from the skies and guarded me.
“But I do think something happened which wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Rushdie will release the book, titled Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, with Penguin Random House on April 16.
On April 21, he will discuss his book and the attack that left him blind in one eye and with a damaged hand as part of a series of events for the Southbank Centre’s Spring Literature and Spoken Word Season.
The Indian-born British author, whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was about to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution when the incident occurred on August 12, 2022.
A man has been charged with attempted murder and assault.
His 1988 book The Satanic Verses has been banned in Iran since it was published as many Muslims view it as blasphemous, and its publication prompted Iran’s then-leader Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his death.
Rushdie began his writing career in the early 1970s and his 1983 novel Midnight’s Children, about the birth of India, won the Booker Prize in 1981.
In 1998, the Iranian government withdrew its support for the death sentence and Rushdie gradually returned to public life, even appearing as himself in the 2001 hit film Bridget Jones’s Diary.
