In August 2022, Salman Rushdie (76) was the victim of a life-threatening knife attack. The British-Indian writer was seriously injured during a lecture in the US state of New York. Since then, Rushdie has been blind in one eye. The author has processed the attack in a new book that will be published next year.
Rushdie’s latest work is titled “Knife. Thoughts after an Attempted Murder.” The book will be published on April 16, 2024 in more than 15 countries, including Germany.
“It was necessary for me to write this book: it is my way of coming to grips with what happened and responding to violence with art,” Rushdie is quoted as saying in a statement from Penguin Publishing. According to Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, it is “a powerful book and a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable.”
It was announced in the summer that Rushdie wanted to cover the attack in a new book. The author said, according to a report in the British Guardian at the Hay Festival in Wales: “I’m trying to write a book about the attack on me – what happened and what it means. Not just about the attack, but also around it .” Before he could turn to other topics again, he first had to process the traumatic experience on a literary level.
The publisher describes “Knife” as, among other things, a “deeply personal and, not least, uplifting meditation on life, love and the power of art, but also on how to find the strength to get up again and carry on.”
