Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
On August 12, 2022, while speaking at a literary festival at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, Salman Rushdie was stabbed 15 times. Now, blind in his right eye and still suffering the aftereffects of the attempted assassination, Rushdie has opened up about the experience in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder (Random House).
From the internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner comes a searing, deeply personal account of enduring — and surviving — an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.
Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events he experienced, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable.
“Language can be that kind of knife, the thing that cuts through to the truth,” Rushdie said, in a recent New York Times interview. “I wanted to use the power of literature — not just in my writing, but in literature in general, to reply to this attack.”
Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art — and finding the strength to stand up again.
Check out these clips of Salman Rushdie reading excerpts from Knife.
About Salman Rushdie:
Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth.
His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America and the recipient of the PEN Centenary Courage Award. His books have been translated into over forty languages. In 2023, he was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year.
(Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths)
