British-Indian author Salman Rushdie is grateful for his recovery after being assassinated at a reading eight months ago. “I was extremely lucky. If the attacker had hit me elsewhere on the body, my story would have ended,” Rushdie (75) told the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”. “I’m glad he didn’t hit those spots. And then the body seems to have an amazing ability to heal.”
Rushdie was attacked by a man at an event in upstate New York in mid-August and seriously injured – he has been blind in one eye since then. Rushdie has been persecuted by religious fanatics for decades. In 1989, the then Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for the writer to be killed because of the novel “The Satanic Verses”.
Rushdie criticized the organizers of the reading for a lack of safety precautions. He has always advised organizers not to go crazy, but a certain level of security must be guaranteed. “Unfortunately nothing was done at this place,” the 75-year-old told the newspaper. “And that was a mistake. When this guy ran towards me, nobody stood in his way.”
Rushdie’s new novel “Victory City” will be published in German translation on April 20th. According to the author, the work on the novel had already been completed before the violent attack.
