Salman Rushdie’s 22nd book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, is his account of the attack on 12 August 2022 that nearly took his life, but it is much more than that: it is a book about love and optimism and miracles of many kinds. It makes a powerful and necessary defence of the principles of free speech; principles for which Rushdie, over the course of the past 35 years, has paid dearly. But his power as one of the great figures of contemporary literature was never dimmed; what’s more, he never lost his (truly excellent) sense of humour, as he showed when we spoke, he via video call from New York, at London’s Southbank Centre in association with English PEN on 21 April. “Words are the only victors,” Rushdie wrote in his last novel, Victory City. Here is the proof.
Salman Rushdie: Well, for about six months, I wasn’t able to think about writing anything really, and during that period, I wasn’t that keen on writing about the attack. But my agent, Andrew Wylie, who obviously knows me better than I know myself, just told me that I was going to write about it. I said, “You know, actually, no, I’m not,” and he said, “Yes, you are”. And he turned out to be right. Because there was a moment when I was able to sit at my desk again, when it struck me that it would be ludicrous to write some kind of fictional text about something completely different. People would think I was avoiding the question – and actually I would think I was avoiding the question.
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