Salman Rushdie says he feels lucky and grateful in first interview since stabbing

Speaking out for the first time since being stabbed at a literary event in New York last year, the author Salman Rushdie described himself feeling fortunate and grateful to have survived the attack.

“I’m lucky,” Rushdie said in an interview that the New Yorker published on Monday. “What I really want to say is that my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude.”

Rushdie, 75, was stabbed in the neck and torso while talking on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York on 12 August 2022 about the importance of the US giving asylum to exiled writers.

The author – who spent years in hiding and long endured death threats over his book The Satanic Verses – was in hospital for six weeks, and he lost vision in one eye as well as the use of one hand.

Authorities arrested 24-year-old Hadi Matar in connection with the assassination attempt that also left the talk’s moderator injured, and they charged the suspect with attempted second-degree murder and attempted second-degree assault. He has pleaded not guilty.

Matar is thought to have been trying to carry out the fatwa – or ruling – that the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put out on Rushdie’s life after many Muslims found The Satanic Verses to be blasphemous in its portrayal of the prophet Muhammad.

In the New Yorker interview conducted by fellow author David Remnick, Rushdie said he solely blamed Matar for the stabbing.

“I blame him,” Rushdie told Remnick when asked who was at fault for an attempt on the life of an Indian-born British author who had spent years under police protection following the fatwa’s issuance but was moving around more openly after moving to the US.

Rushdie declined to place any blame on those in charge of security at the talk where he was stabbed. The site did not have walk-through or wand metal detectors to screen audience members for weapons. Security screening was instead reportedly limited to checking for tickets and preventing people from bringing in food or drinks.

“I’ve tried very hard over these years to avoid recrimination and bitterness,” Rushdie said. “I just think it’s not a good look. One of the ways I’ve dealt with this whole thing is to look forward and not backwards. What happens tomorrow is more important than what happened yesterday.”

Rushdie released a photo of himself on Twitter, saying: The photo in New Yorker is dramatic and powerful but this, more prosaically, is what I actually look like.”

Rushdie also spoke with Remnick about feeling thankful to the first responders in western New York and doctors in nearby Erie, Pennsylvania, who treated his wounds and saved his life. “At some point, I’d like to go up there and say thank you,” Rushdie said.

He also said his grown sons Zafar and Milan – who live in London – and his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, have aided his physical and mental recovery immensely.

Rushdie said Griffiths in particular has been dealing with the doctors and nurses treating him as well as the law enforcement officials trying to bring his would-be killer to justice.

“She kind of took over at a point when I was helpless,” Rushdie said. “She just took over everything, as well as having the emotional burden of my almost being killed.”

He said his “big injuries are healed, essentially”, and that he had regained feeling in his thumb, index finger and bottom half of his palm after undergoing “a lot of … therapy” on his affected hand.

He added that it was difficult for him to get much writing done because some of his fingertips lacked feeling.

“I’m able to walk around,” Rushdie told Remnick. “I mean, there are bits of my body that need constant checkups. It was a colossal attack.”

Rushdie also said: “I’ve been better. But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad.”

Rushdie’s interview with Remnick was published days before a 9 February release date for his new novel, Victory City. The novelist’s agent, Andrew Wylie, said Rushdie would “not be making any public appearances to promote his forthcoming novel” as he continues recovering from the stabbing.

Rushdie presents Victory City as an abridged translation of a fictitious Sanskrit verse saga that was long buried in the ground in a pot but is now being retold by a humble narrator.

He completed the novel before his stabbing. He told Remnick that he hoped readers are drawn to the book on its own merits and not simply because of what he survived.

“I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” Rushdie said. “Then you’re just sitting there saying, ‘Somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me’ … Which I do sometimes think!

“But what I don’t think is: that’s what I want people reading the book to think. I want them to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.”