Knife: Salman Rushdie Announces Memoir About The Attack (image:penguinrandomhouse.com;twitter/SalmanRushdie)
Salman Rushdie, Booker-winning novelist, will write a memoir about his experience of being stabbed in an attack at a public event last year. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder will be published by Penguin Random House on April 16.
“This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,” Mr Rushdie said in a statement.
Rushdie was attacked onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, where he was to give a lecture. Suddenly, a 24-year-old man rushed to the stage and stabbed Rushdie repeatedly. He was gravely injured, placed temporarily on a ventilator and lost his right eye.
The assailant, Hadi Matar, pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder.
“Knife is a searing book, and a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable,” said Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya in a statement. “We are honoured to publish it, and amazed at Salman’s determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves,” he added.
The 256-page “Knife” will be published in the U.S. by Random House, an imprint of Penguin Random House. In February this year, they have published Rushdie’s novel, Victory City.
The author’s life was under threat of attack before also. In 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa on Rushdie after the publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, inspired from the life of the Prophet Mohammad. After the fatwa, author went into hiding for nearly a decade, and recounted the experience in his previous memoir in 2012, titled Joseph Anton.
An acclaimed author, Mr Rushdie has received the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker Prize for his novel Midnight’s Children. Some of his other prominent works include Shame, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte.
