Salman Rushdie to publish first fiction work since 2022 knife attack

Celebrated Indian-British novelist Salman Rushdie is due to make his return to fiction with his first works written after he survived a knife attack in 2022.

Rushdie, 77, is set to release three novellas, each around 70 pages, comprising a singular new work. It’s the first fiction work that the author has written for publication since a stabbing incident in which he lost his right eye.

In August 2022, Hadi Matar rushed to a stage in New York as Rushdie was giving a lecture and stabbed him repeatedly. Matar has since pleaded not guilty to the charge of second degree murder and awaits trial this October. He also faces a second set of charges for terrorism.

This isn’t the first piece of writing that Rushdie has released since the stabbing. In 2023, the author released “Victory City”, a novel that he had completed before the incident. This year, he also released “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’” a memoir on the incident and also an attempt to reclaim the narrative for himself.

Rushdie announced the upcoming triptych of novellas at Lviv BookForum. The author dialled into the long-running Ukrainian literary festival via video call and explained that the three works would each relate to the “three worlds in my life: India and England and America. And they all in some way consider the idea of an ending.”

The Guardian reported that Rushdie explained his motivations for focusing on endings at this point in his literary career: “When you get to this age you obviously think about how long is left. There obviously aren’t 22 more that are going to be written. If I’m lucky, there will be one or two.”

Rushdie rose to prominence for his second novel “Midnight’s Children”, which uses his trademark magical realism style and themes of migrations, the Indian subcontinent and the West. It won him the 1981 Booker Prize and has twice been called the “best novel of all the winners” at the 25th and 40th anniversary of the prize.

Fame became infamy after his fourth novel “The Satanic Verses”, released in 1988, made him the target of multiple assassination attempts after Ruhollah Khomeini, the then-Supreme Leader of Iran, issuing a fatwa against the author.

20 countries banned the sale of “The Satanic Verses” for its perceived blasphemy by referring to a selection of verses that were supposedly spoken to Muhammad as part of the Qur’an but were later withdrawn as they were believed to be sent to the profit by the devil posing as God.

After its publication, 10,000 protestors gathered to denounce Rushdie and the book in Islamabad, Pakistan. Six protestors were killed in an attack on the American Cultural Center. The book was publicly burned in the UK and India stopped imports of it.

When Khomeini issued the fatwa, calling for Muslims to kill the author, the British government put Rushdie under constant police protection.

Many people associated with the book have also been injured or killed due to its publication. Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi was murdered in 1991. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator was stabbed. William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher survived a shooting attempt and Turkish translator Aziz Nesin narrowly escaped a mob of arsonists.