An Interview with Salman Rushdie
From Brick 117
Brick 117 Summer 2026
On February 14, 1989, Salman Rushdie became the most famous writer on earth. That was when the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran pronounced a fatwa, sentencing to death Rushdie and all involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses_. A bounty of £1.5 million was offered. Rushdie immediately went into hiding. In the summer of 1991, the Japanese translator of_ The Satanic Verses was murdered and its Italian translator was stabbed and left for dead; two years later, Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher was seriously wounded.
Then in 1998, through negotiations between Britain, where Rushdie was hiding, and Iran, the fatwa was lifted. Still, when I interviewed him the following year at the University of Toronto, there was a phalanx of guards and everyone in the audience of seventeen hundred was searched.
For almost twenty-five years after that time, the security detail was gone and Rushdie himself was living in New York City.
Salman Rushdie’s pre-_Satanic Verses _reputation was based on two big novels: Midnight’s Children_, an exuberant allegory of post-independence India that won the 1981 Booker Prize, then the Booker of Bookers, and finally, the Best of the Bookers, and was made into a movie directed by Deepa Mehta; his other big novel back then was_ Shame_, a similar mix of history, politics, and myth, set in a country that is, as he says, “not Pakistan, or not quite.”_
Salman Rushdie became an emblem and proponent of human rights and especially freedom of expression. He was president of PEN America, and he founded their annual World Voices Festival. In 2007, he was knighted for his services to literature. And all along the way, he never stopped writing and publishing. In 2012 he produced a substantial memoir, Joseph Anton_, focusing on those years spent underground. It was a name he took during the fatwa_—Joseph from Conrad and Anton from Chekhov. The book chronicles his nightmare but also reveals what made and makes him a writer.
In August 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York State—a community of artists, educators, faith leaders, and others dedicated to exploring the best of humanity—Salman Rushdie was brutally stabbed multiple times in the neck, torso, and face as he came on stage to give a talk on artistic freedom. He survived but lost the sight in one eye, and a hand was incapacitated because the nerves in his arm were cut.
In spring 2024, Rushdie published a different kind of memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder_. For decades after the fatwa, he moved freely. But now, when he makes public appearances, of necessity the security is back. In April 2025, Salman Rushdie was awarded Montreal’s Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix for lifetime achievement. We spoke on stage._
Eleanor Wachtel: I never start an interview this way, and the last time I did was with you in 1992 when you made a secret visit to Toronto for an appearance at a PEN Canada event and to meet with Canadian politicians: How are you?
Salman Rushdie: I’m okay, thank you. I’m very pleased to be here. I’ve been in Canada a few times, but somehow not to this part of the country for quite a while. It’s been at least fifteen years since I was in Montreal. Good to be back.
Wachtel: So you’re well, physically and mentally?
Rushdie: I’m all right.
Wachtel: You’re still seeing a shrink? Well, you live in New York.
Rushdie: The shrink comes with the territory.
Wachtel: I will start for real now, and I’d like to begin with miracles. Not just the fact that you’re sitting with me here tonight, which we’ll get to shortly, but the miraculous in your fiction. As you say in your memoir Knife, “I don’t believe in miracles, but, yes, my books do.” How did the miraculous enter your storytelling?
Rushdie: Realism in the novel is a relatively recent invention. It’s kind of nineteenth century. Most of the history of the novel is fantastic. Very strange things happen if we go to the eighteenth century: There’s Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travels. If we go further back, there’s Don Quixote. Realism may have outlived its usefulness. The world is so surreal and bizarre nowadays that realism isn’t able to encompass it. For me, naturalistic fiction is the fantasy fiction. The world isn’t naturalistic; it’s very strange right now.
Wachtel: You’ve talked about how the miraculous and everyday coexist, especially in India.
Rushdie: Also in Latin America. I remember going there for the first time, after I’d read its great writers. I was briefly in Cuba, and then I was in Nicaragua to write a short reportage book about the Contra War and the Sandinista Revolution. When I got there, I thought, Oh, it’s as García Márquez described; he didn’t make it up. He’d said there was nothing in his work that didn’t have a basis in reality. Parts of Latin America and India had many things in common. They both had a colonial history_—different colonizers, but a colonial history. They shared a great wealth disparity. They both had an enormously powerful religious influence—different religions, but still—_and a great tension between the reality of the city and that of the village. It was the world I knew translated into Spanish, and it felt familiar, even though I’d never been there. Reading contemporary African fiction, you get a similar feeling that the invention of Afrofuturism is mostly real observation blended with imaginative writing. Your own Margaret Atwood has done well to abandon realism.
Wachtel: Except that she says everything is real and has been unfortunately proven right.
Rushdie: And she’s right. I know she uses the term speculative fiction, which is a good term because the novel of ideas has always been present. I’ve been rereading Voltaire’s Candide, and that’s a book that doesn’t obey any rules: People die and come back to life. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean seems to take about five minutes. He breaks every rule and writes a masterpiece. It’s not new, the kind of thing I have done quite a lot; it crops up in different cultures at different times. Franz Kafka is not exactly naturalistic, nor is Mikhail Bulgakov.
Wachtel: I once asked you what book made you what you are today, and you said One Thousand and One Nights.
Rushdie: I might also say Alice in Wonderland, the first book I fell in love with as a child. It’s interesting what children’s books made it to India. Alice got there, Winnie-the-Pooh did not. I had to read Winnie-the-Pooh when I was much too old.
Wachtel: You did your own take on One Thousand and One Nights in your 2015 novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which, if you do the math, is one thousand and one.
Rushdie: Touring when that book came out, there was always somebody in the audience who would stand up and ask, “What if it’s a leap year?” And I would say, “It’s not a fucking leap year.”
Wachtel: You’ve said it was your father who read to you from the “great wonder tales of the East.”
Rushdie: He told me his own versions. If you look at One Thousand and One Nights, it’s not written for children. For a start, it’s full of sex.
Wachtel: You had the unexpurgated version in India. Here in Canada, for children we had—
Rushdie: Oh, you had a cleaned-up version.
Wachtel: No sex.
Rushdie: Make it One Thousand and One Afternoons.
Wachtel: Was your father a good storyteller?
Rushdie: I remember he was enjoyable at bedtime, when he wasn’t drunk. Which was never. That was the problem with him. On the one hand, he was delightful; on the other, he had a real drinking problem.
Wachtel: Your father makes an appearance in your memoir Knife, as you recall flying with him to England in January 1961 when you were thirteen—
Rushdie: Thirteen and a half, yes.
Wachtel: You were about to start boarding school. He was a difficult man and a kind of dark presence in your story. Can you talk about that?
Rushdie: He’s been gone a long time; he died in 1987. The funny thing is he shows up in my dreams, and he’s great. He’s really loving and friendly and warm-hearted. He’s been much better since he died than when he was alive, so I’ve restored my relationship with him posthumously. Now I’m very fond of him.
Wachtel: I was surprised he showed up in this memoir—not in a good light most of the time.
Rushdie: Anybody who’s read my books knows problematic relationships between fathers and sons run through a few of them. That’s part of what you get from childhood: You don’t choose it.
Wachtel: But in this book, you talk about striking him, and I haven’t seen that elsewhere in your interviews or writing.
Rushdie: Oh gosh, yes, that’s true. I did hit him once. He was being rude to my mother, and I got angry—I was about nineteen or twenty years old—and yeah, I hit him. He was very strong, and afterwards I thought, God, he’s going to hit me back and it’s going to really hurt. But he didn’t. I think he was in some way ashamed.
Wachtel: Your father was convinced you weren’t the writer in the family. That was your middle sister.
Rushdie: He always used to say she was the writer of the family. She never wrote anything, of course.
Wachtel: And when you told him you wanted to be a writer, he said, “What will I tell my friends?”
Rushdie: It was fortunate that he lived long enough for his friends to start calling him and congratulating him on my work. Then he took the credit, which is fine. I would have done the same.
Wachtel: Your mother was a teacher who liked stories of a different kind. You’ve described her as a world-class gossip.
Rushdie: She told true stories that weren’t supposed to be told.
Wachtel: What kind of influence did she have on you?
Rushdie: Although my father was the one who had studied English literature at Cambridge, my mother was a better reader, a more intelligent reader. You could have interesting conversations with her about books.
Wachtel: Did she read your books?
Rushdie: She read Midnight’s Children and Shame and so on, but she lived much longer than my father. When I sent her my first collection of non-fiction, Imaginary Homelands, she said, “This is good because the pieces are short and I can read one at a time. I don’t have to sit down and read a five-hundred-page book.” She liked them short.
Wachtel: What was interesting though, about your mother, was that she loved gossip but she had her own secrets.
Rushdie: I think everybody’s got secrets. I didn’t know for a long time that both my parents had been married before. That was a dark family secret that eventually emerged, and then I put it in Midnight’s Children.
Wachtel: I can see why they kept secrets from you.
Rushdie: I think Czesław Miłosz said something like: When a writer enters a family, the family is fucked.
Wachtel: I thought that was Philip Roth.
Rushdie: True, either way.
Wachtel: At King’s College, Cambridge, which was your father’s alma mater, you studied history. What were your aspirations?
Rushdie: What I didn’t want to be was an academic. I’d always loved the study of history, but it never occurred to me to go into postgraduate studies or to try for an academic life. When I was at Cambridge, I wanted to be an actor. There was an active student theatre scene that I was involved in. I got the college annoyed because they thought I wasn’t paying enough attention to my academic studies, and they threatened to withdraw my minor scholarship. Well, I went on acting, and they withdrew the minor scholarship, so my father had to pay a bit more money. I did a lot of acting at Cambridge; I was in all sorts of things. There was a production of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist in Jesus College’s cloisters, and research showed that was the site of the play’s first ever production. If so, we were performing in the birthplace of the play. I was in Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. I now know how to turn into a rhinoceros.
Wachtel: You know how to what?
Rushdie: Turn into a rhinoceros. That’s what happens to the characters in the play: They gradually turn into rhinoceroses. It’s the theatre of the absurd. A talented young director put it on, Keith Hack, who had worked at the Berliner Ensemble. I asked him what the play was about. He said, very kindly, “You know, Salman, it’s about fascism.” I said, “Oh, how is it about fascism?” And he said, “It’s about how you could be living in a community where your next-door neighbours turn into monsters. The people you were hanging out with last week—your children were playing with their children—are suddenly terrifying. They’re rhinoceroses.” When I wrote my novel Quichotte, I stole that idea. I had my characters turn into pink elephants for the same reason, to denote their becoming monsters. If you’re going to steal stuff, steal the good stuff. Don’t steal the cheap silver.
Wachtel: I am interested in how you went from history and acting to writing. You actually had some conversations with E. M. Forster when you were in Cambridge.
Rushdie: I was lucky that he was a fellow at King’s College when I nineteen and he was ninety-one. For half the time I was at Cambridge, he wasn’t there because he fell down some stairs and was badly hurt and almost died. He was there at the beginning, and fortunately, he was there again at the end of my time. Because India had been so important for him, he was interested in my Indian background, and I had tea with him a few times. I played croquet with E. M. Forster in King’s College Fellows’ Garden. That’s an unlikely sentence.
Wachtel: It’s like something out of Alice in Wonderland, speaking of.
Rushdie: He was very approachable and friendly. Of course, a lot of the students were terrified: That’s E. M. Forster; we can’t go anywhere near him. But he would sit in the students’ common room, get a little drink, and welcome people coming up to chat.
Wachtel: And he encouraged you.
Rushdie: He said a nice thing to me. I kind of shyly, terrifyingly, confessed that I might want to write a book at some point. It’s like telling Shakespeare you want to write a play. He generously told me he’d always thought the best books about India would be written by somebody, as he said, with a Cambridge education but who came from there. I kept that in my inside pocket until I did something.
Wachtel: One of the things you did was Midnight’s Children. Your sensibility came across in that 1981 novel, which became an international success. You were just thirty-three at the time. How did you find your voice or style with Midnight’s Children?
Rushdie: It wasn’t easy. I had written one novel before, Grimus, which I had come to feel was flawed and hadn’t gotten a good response when it was published. Although I have to say that Ursula K. Le Guin liked it. After Grimus, she followed my career and frequently wrote about my work, and I was very touched: I didn’t know her. I’d never met her. A couple years before she died, I was on a book tour in Portland, Oregon, and she came to my event just to say hello. I was able to briefly talk to her and thank her for giving me a little starting push and then staying interested in my career. But after my slightly false start, I had to rethink my approach to writing. To use the old cliché write what you know, I thought I would write a novel about childhood based on my own growing up in Bombay, as I still call it. If you want, I can give you my two dollars on why Bombay and not Mumbai is the correct name.
Wachtel: A two-dollar bill is no longer a Canadian currency, but we’ll take change.
Rushdie: Bombay is unlike other major Indian cities, in that it’s not an ancient city. Delhi has been there for thousands of years, and Calcutta predates colonial rule. The British built Bombay on seven islands and land between the islands they reclaimed from the sea to create a peninsula. Before it was in British possession, the area was colonized by the Portuguese. In the seventeenth century, British statesmen negotiated a marriage between King Charles II and Catherine of Braganza of the Portuguese royal house. Charles II was famously a kind of playboy who liked pretty girls, which Catherine was famously not, so the British negotiated a big dowry. The islands came into British possession in Catherine’s dowry. They immediately built a fort and put the navy in the harbour, and the British Empire followed. The Portuguese had called the location Bombaía because of the harbour: beautiful bay, bom baía. Bombaía became Bombay. In the various languages of India, it’s mostly been called that. In Hindi and Gujarati, it’s called Bombay. In Marathi, it has always been called Mumbai. When Bombay became the capital of the state of Maharashtra, there arose a kind of right-wing Hindu nationalist–Marathi regionalist party called the Shiv Sena, which took power in the city. They wanted to Marathi-ize all the place names and produced a false etymological rationale. One of the popular goddesses in that part of the country is Mumba Devi, meaning Mumba the Goddess. Mumba Devi’s name can also be rendered as Mumbabai, Lady Mumba. The argument was that the city was renamed after Mumbabai, which was collapsed into Mumbai. It’s a very good explanation. It’s just not the full truth.
Wachtel: That’s at least ten dollars’ worth. But you started saying that you were growing up in Bombay—
Rushdie: Bombay was and is a cosmopolitan city because it’s the major port on the western seashore. It’s the economic powerhouse of the country, apart from the new technology industries, which are all in South India. Traditional economies, in textile, steel, are around Bombay. There are more non-Indians living in Bombay than anywhere else in the country, but also people from all over India gather there. Everything to the north of Bombay is North India; everything to the south of Bombay is South India. It’s such an economic magnet. Many languages are spoken in the streets, and other cities are not like that. If you’re in Delhi, it’s mostly people from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, mostly speaking Hindi. In Calcutta, it’s mostly Bengali people speaking Bengali. In Madras, now called Chennai for equally spurious reasons, most people are speaking Tamil. But Bombay has everyone. You grow up in this everyone city, this kind of world city.
Wachtel: You recently described Midnight’s Children as a book in which you “tried to reclaim not only India but myself.”
Rushdie: I was living in London after university, and I was worried about losing touch with, for want of a better word, my roots. So I did two things. First, I gave up my job in advertising and used all the money I’d saved to go to India for as long as I could, living very cheaply, travelling on fourteen-hour bus journeys because I couldn’t afford flights, and just being there as deeply as possible. A lot of my time was spent revisiting places I knew well, sometimes going to places I’d not been to before but wanted to see. Out of that came what would be Midnight’s Children. I was there for not quite six months. Then I returned to England with a book to write. The second thing I did was teach myself how to write the book. I had quite a stumbling start because initially it wasn’t a first-person narrative, and it just wasn’t working. One day I asked myself what would happen if I let the character tell the story. When I sat down—and I remember this day vividly—what came out of my typewriter (we had these things called typewriters) was essentially the first paragraph of Midnight’s Children. I did a little reshaping, but not very much. I thought, Where did this come from? This voice is so strong, I better just let him go and hold on to his coattails for the ride. And that’s what I did: He told the story, I wrote it down.
Wachtel: You followed Midnight’s Children with Shame, which cemented your reputation as one of the most inventive contemporary writers. You’ve said there was a point in your life where you could have written a version of Midnight’s Children every few years, but you always wanted to try something you hadn’t done.
Rushdie: I still think that.
Wachtel: The next new thing was your 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. We don’t need a reminder of what happened when that book came out or its impact on you in the decade that followed, but you were determined not to be silenced as a writer. You continued to write and publish books of fiction, essays, and memoir. But in terms of the themes that interested you, how do you think your subject matter was affected?
Rushdie: I probably would not have written the memoirs, because I had no interest in writing about myself. I wanted to make shit up until I acquired the curse of an interesting life. Then I thought, I don’t want anybody else to tell my story, because as it happens, I’m a writer.
Going back to The Satanic Verses, what I set out to do in that novel, primarily, was write about London. I’d written two books about the world I came from, India and Pakistan, and I wanted to write a book about the world I came to, about people like me who had made that migration from South Asia. This was in the mid-eighties, the time of Margaret Thatcher, when there was more hostility toward South Asian people in England than there is now. It was an era of Paki-bashing, violent attacks, and racial unrest. I had been working on a voluntary basis with race-relations organizations in London during the seventies, and I knew quite a lot about the Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi communities in different parts of London. I invented this London borough called Brickhall, which was a mixture of Brick Lane, where the Muslim population was living, and Southall, where the Hindu population was living. The Sikh population was based around Wembley Stadium, and I couldn’t fit that into the name. I was drawing on all this local experience, so I thought of The Satanic Verses as my London novel. In the course of the novel, there’s a delusional character who dreams about the birth of a religion, and some people didn’t like that. Now that the fuss has died down, people are able to read it more neutrally, not expecting it to be scandalous. For a start, 1988 is so long ago. If you’re under forty, it’s ancient history. Younger readers are able to approach it as they would any other book and they seem to like it. I’ve never understood why the people who didn’t like the book got to determine what it was about.
Wachtel: Or the people who didn’t actually read it.
Rushdie: That’s a sore point. Most of the people who attacked it had absolutely no idea what it was about. As the book has lived its life, people write me or approach me to ask, “Where’s the dirty bit?” Or they say, “Who knew it was funny?” They can’t see what the trouble was.
Wachtel: Well, anyone who knows you would know it was funny.
Rushdie: Gradually, the novel has acquired a readership that is not tainted by the shadow of what happened to it. And that’s worth fighting for.
Wachtel: I should skip ahead to that taintedness. Your involvement with PEN and other organizations—you’ve been a high-profile defender of free speech—and, ironically, your role in creating sanctuary for writers under threat of persecution took you to Chautauqua in southwest New York State in August 2022. You say you don’t believe in premonitions, but you had a rather charged dream two nights before the event.
Rushdie: I had a dream about being attacked in an amphitheatre. I mean, the amphitheatre was like the Colosseum, and the attacker was like a gladiator.
Wachtel: With a spear.
Rushdie: With a spear, a sort of javelin-like thing. Not a little squirt with a knife. I was woken up by this dream and told my wife, Eliza, about it. I knew I was going to speak in an amphitheatre, which is probably why it ended up in my dream. I considered that I shouldn’t go. Then I thought, People don’t change their plans because they had a bad dream. I’ll go. Maybe I should have paid attention to the dream.
Wachtel: Do you normally remember your dreams?
Rushdie: My dreams were always boring. I used to feel I’d exhausted all my imagination while I was awake, so I’d dream about going for a walk or reading the newspaper. I liked that my dreams had this absolute banality. Since the attack, they have become more dramatic. I’m not saying they’re all violent, but they have more action.
Wachtel: I guess you wouldn’t have considered using a dream in your earlier fiction.
Rushdie: The biggest dream sequence is the one in The Satanic Verses, the guy dreaming the origin of a religion.
Wachtel: But that isn’t a dream you had.
Rushdie: That isn’t a dream I had, no. Otherwise, I do agree that dreams are too easy a device in fiction. Anything could happen, and therefore nothing matters. If you’re going to use dream sequences, you have to understand how they work inside the story. One problem with having written this number of books is I can’t remember details from my own fiction; if readers remember another dream sequence in my writing, they’re probably right. The most worrying thing about having done this for half a century is the risk of unintentional repetition. Translators are the first to notice. I remember my Danish translator wrote to me saying, “In your new book, on page 237, a certain character says such and such, and as you know, thirty years ago in this earlier novel, on page 186, a completely different character says the same thing. I just wondered why you felt the need to make an intertextual connection between these works.” In those cases, you have to pretend you did it on purpose.
Wachtel: The opening chapter of your memoir Knife is immediate and visceral. The reader is with you in the moment, both in your head and following the action on stage, literally in your body and somehow detached from it as well. The account is horrifying and riveting, but what was it like for you to go back into that experience, to relive it on the page?
Rushdie: The first chapter was hard to write. It took me a while to decide I wanted to do the memoir at all, and then I knew I couldn’t bury the lede, as they say. If this is the subject, you’ve got to put the subject up front, right from the outset. I had to convince myself to just tell the story. Once I had done it, the rest of the book became easier to write.
I discovered, as more evidence was revealed through film footage, that my memory wasn’t exactly right. I think this is what happens to us all after a moment of crisis: You fill in the gaps of your memory, and sometimes you absolutely believe the version you’ve told yourself, while the film tells you something else. For instance, I thought I was standing up when he got to me, but actually I was sitting down. Everything happened at high speed.
Wachtel: Twenty-seven seconds.
Rushdie: That’s a number I got out of newspaper reports. I didn’t have a stopwatch with me at the time. Twenty-seven seconds sounds, when you say it that way, like not very long. But if one of you has a knife and the other person doesn’t, you can do a lot of damage in half a minute.
Wachtel: You said the first thing you knew was the title of the book, Knife. And in that powerful opening chapter, also titled “Knife,” you talk about the knife being not just an instrument or an implement or, in this case, a weapon, but also an idea.
Rushdie: The weird thing is that I never saw the knife. I had no visual memory of the knife. I mean, now I do, because it was entered as evidence in the trial, a ten-inch blade. But in the moment, it was an abstraction. I understood that I’d been punctured all over my body a number of times, but I never saw the weapon. Then I began, because I’m that kind of writer, to think of the knife as metaphor. If I were to fight back, my only weapon would be language, so I viewed language as a kind of knife. And if you’re in a knife fight, bring a knife.
Wachtel: Your book.
Rushdie: Yes, it’s called Knife because it’s my way of fighting what came at me.
Wachtel: Oddly your attacker came to the event with a bag of knives.
Rushdie: Only two or three extra knives, but it’s very weird to bring a backpack with a selection of knives.
Wachtel: Do you have any idea what that was about? Did it come out at the trial?
Rushdie: He didn’t give any testimony at the trial, so I have no way of knowing what he was thinking. Did he want to make a last-minute decision about which one to use, or did he want to pass them out for other people to join in? He did things that are very mysterious. Just about the last thing he did before he got on the bus from New Jersey to Western New York—almost to Canada but on the other side of Lake Erie—was call the gym and cancel his membership. I guess he thought, I may not be coming back soon, so why go on paying the monthly installments? It’s interesting what people consider important when they’re about to commit murder.
Wachtel: For all the darkness and violence of the attack you describe in your memoir, Knife is also a story about love, about your relationship with your wife of six years, the writer and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Rushdie: Describing the attack itself doesn’t take that long. I could do that in a dozen pages. That’s not a book, that’s an article. If there was a book in this, what would it be about? In the end, I came to think of it as a shape, as a triangle. I was at one point of the triangle, and Eliza and the attacker were at its other points, representing opposite poles: life and death, love and hate. And then I thought, That’s a book: the relationship between these three things, me at the intersection of two forces, one powerfully negative and one powerfully positive. I also thought it would be nice to surprise people who were expecting a true crime story with a love story instead.
Wachtel: Is love one of the miracles, if we can call it that, of the experience you describe?
Rushdie: It certainly helped me stay alive. I say in the book that love is a real force. It’s not just a sentimental thing; it’s powerful and it can save your life.
Wachtel: Although I’d say it’s not easy to write about happiness. To quote Montherlant, “Happiness writes in white ink on white pages.” Or Tolstoy, “All happy families are alike.”
Rushdie: All happy families are alike? No, they’re not. I know Anna Karenina is a great novel, and that’s the opening line, but it’s wrong. A little revision perhaps, Count Tolstoy.
I wanted to say that happiness was the antithesis of the kind of unpleasantness that came in my direction. Then also to ask the question, If you are subject to an attack of this kind, how do you get your life back? How do you regain happiness, peace, and calm? That’s also part of what the book’s about.
Wachtel: The other miracle, of course, is that you survived—it was not at all clear at first that you would—but you don’t like to describe it as a miracle. Why not?
Rushdie: Because I don’t believe in miracles. I just happened to be the recipient of one. The kind of miracle it is, which I do believe in, is the miracle of medicine. I believe in the miracle of skillful surgeons. Then there were pieces of blind good luck. I was transported very quickly from the scene of the crime to a trauma hospital across the state line in Pennsylvania by helicopter. The fact is, it was a very nice day, sunny and warm and beautiful. Had it been raining and not a nice day, perhaps the helicopter couldn’t have flown and I wouldn’t be here. The weather helped. The combination of things like straightforward good luck and medical skill saved my life. I don’t think a hand reached down from the skies and protected me, because the hand would know I’m not on that team.
Wachtel: The trial of your assailant, whom you call “the A”—
Rushdie: You can fill in your own word. I didn’t want his name in my book.
Wachtel: The trial took place this past February at the Chautauqua County Courthouse. Were you required to testify? Is it something you felt you needed to do?
Rushdie: I was subpoenaed. The district attorney thought the jury should hear directly from me.
Wachtel: In court, you recounted a version of the opening chapter of your book. You gave your testimony in visceral detail. What was it like to be there in the same room with your would-be murderer?
Rushdie: He was unimpressive physically and in his behaviour. I thought he was a little jerk, but little jerks can almost kill you. As far as I could tell, he never looked in my direction. He was at a table on the other side of the courtroom with his attorneys, and he seemed to be intently staring down at a yellow pad. Maybe he was doodling or making notes. I have no idea. I didn’t know how I would react. I felt quite neutral about it. I felt kind of nothing being there. It didn’t bother me. Maybe it should have. Maybe it bothered him.
Wachtel: After just two hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of assault and attempted murder in the second degree. Did that give you any sense of closure?
Rushdie: Yes, it felt good. I wasn’t there by that time because the whole trial was spread over almost two weeks, but I was in touch with the district attorney. I remember I was at home when he sent me the text, “Guilty on both counts.” That felt very good. We still don’t know the sentencing.
Wachtel: The sentencing was supposed to happen a couple of days ago.
Rushdie: At the request of the defence apparently, it was postponed. Nobody has given me an explanation. It’s next month now, I hope, unless there are any further delays. I don’t know why there should be.
Wachtel: You hope—so there can be a kind of closure?
Rushdie: To draw a line under it. I want to know how long he gets. The maximum sentence in New York State for attempted murder is twenty-five years, but because he also attacked my interviewer, Henry Reese, who was onstage with me, and he was found guilty of aggravated assault, that’s another seven years. It’s up to the judge to decide whether the sentences run consecutively or concurrently. He’s only twenty-seven, and I hope he gets as long— I don’t want him to be out on the street any time soon, but it’s not in my hands.
Wachtel: Now, adding to the miracle—if you forgive me using the word—of your survival and the book Knife that came from it, you have a new work of fiction coming out this fall, stories written since the attack.
Rushdie: Most of them were written since the attack—three very long stories, novellas really, and two shorter pieces.
Wachtel: It’s called The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories. They are set in Bombay, England, Cambridge especially, and the U.S.
Rushdie: With little journeys to Spain and, at one point, into the Kafkaesque.
Wachtel: Yes, there are allusions to Francisco Goya, Franz Kafka, and Hieronymus Bosch, just to provide a sense of the tone.
Rushdie: There’s a bit of each of them. I was in Madrid last year, and I went to see the famous Velázquez, Goya, and Bosch pieces at the Prado. In the room with Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, I was struck by a much smaller painting called _The Extraction of the Stone of Madnes_s. It’s a wonderful idea that madness is a stone you can extract, and that has something to do with my collection. The stories are very unlike each other, not only in setting, but also in manner. Weirdly, to me, they fit together well partly because they’re different kinds of fiction. It’s my way of saying, I can do this, and I can do that too, and here’s another thing I can do.
Wachtel: You’re insistently forward-looking, certainly in your writing, but a line in Knife caught my attention, “We would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.”
Rushdie: I stole most of that from Samuel Beckett.
Wachtel: That’s why I caught it. It also made me think of something the central character of your last novel, Victory City, writes, a narrative poem called “Victory and Defeat.” You say that could also be the title for the story of your life, but having followed your career for decades, I see only victory.
Rushdie: Yes, well, you don’t see the other stuff.
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Writer and broadcaster ELEANOR WACHTEL loves books and their authors and has managed to gagner her vie by sharing that passion. Five selections of her interviews have been published, including Random Illuminations, a collection of reflections, correspondence, and conversations with Carol Shields; Original Minds; and for the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary, The Best of Writers & Company.
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of 23 books, including Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; and a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, his account of surviving an attack on his life, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
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by Anne Carson