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Salman Rushdie says he is "over" knife attack
Salman Rushdie says he is "over" knife attack

BBC News

time3 days ago

  • Entertainment
  • BBC News

Salman Rushdie says he is "over" knife attack

Sir Salman Rushdie says he has moved on from the knife attack which has seen his attacker jailed for attempted Matar, 27, was sentenced to 25 years last month after repeatedly stabbing Sir Salman on a New York lecture stage in Salman, who has a new book out later this year, told the Hay Festival that an "important moment" came for him when he and his wife Eliza "went back to the scene of the crime to show myself I could stand up where I fell down". "It will be nice to talk about fiction again because ever since the attack, really the only thing anybody's wanted to talk about is the attack, but I'm over it." Sir Salman recently told Radio 4's Today programme that he was "pleased" the man who tried to kill him had received the maximum possible prison Midnight's Children and Satanic Verses writer was left with life-changing injuries after the incident - he is now blind in one eye, has damage to his liver and a paralysed hand caused by nerve damage to his year, Sir Salman published a book titled Knife reflecting on the event, which he has described as "my way of fighting back".The attack came 35 years after Sir Salman's controversial novel The Satanic Verses, which had long made him the target of death threats for its portrayal of the Prophet November, the author will publish a short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, his first work of fiction to be written since the stabbing. Tight security Security was tight for Sir Salman's event, with sniffer dogs present and bag checks leading to a 15-minute waved at the audience as he entered the stage and humbly gestured to them to stop applauding before joking that: "I can't see everyone - but I can hear them."He said he was feeling "excellent" although there "were bits of me that I'm annoyed about, like not having a right eye. But on the whole, I've been very fortunate and I'm in better shape that maybe I would have expected." In a wide-ranging discussion, Sir Salman also touched on US politics, declaring that "America was not in great shape". In an apparent reference to President Donald Trump, Sir Salman spoke about "the moment of hope, that image of Barack and Michelle Obama walking down the mall in DC with the crowds around them... people dancing in the streets in New York. And to go from that to the orange moment that we live in, it's, let's just say, he said he was still positive about the future."I think I suffer from the optimism disease... I can't help thinking somehow it will be alright." Free speech Speaking about free speech, he said "it means tolerating people who say things you don't like".He recalled a time when a film "in which I was the villain", made around the time of the uproar over Satanic Verses, was not classified by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) "because it was in a hundred ways defamatory" but he asked them to allow its release. "So they gave it a certificate... and nobody went, you know why? Lousy movie. And it taught me a lesson. Let it out and trust the audience. And that's still my view."I think we do live in a moment when people are too eager to prohibit speech they disapprove of. That's a very slippery slope" and warned young people "to think about it." When asked about the effect of AI on authors, Sir Salman said: "I don't have Chat GPT... I try very hard to pretend it doesn't exist. Someone asked it to write a couple of hundred words like me... it was terrible. And it has no sense of humour."Despite being considered one of the greatest living writers, Sir Salman joked that authors "don't even have that much money... except the two of us (him and host Erica Wagner) and those who write about child wizards... the Taylor Swift of literature," referring to JK Rowling. "Good on her." More from the Hay Festival Succession creator Jesse Armstrong is writing about rich people againJacqueline Wilson says she wouldn't return to Tracy Beaker as an adult

Rushdie 'pleased' with attacker's maximum sentence
Rushdie 'pleased' with attacker's maximum sentence

Yahoo

time26-05-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Yahoo

Rushdie 'pleased' with attacker's maximum sentence

Author Sir Salman Rushdie has said he is "pleased" the man who tried to kill him in a knife attack in 2022 has received the maximum possible prison sentence. Hadi Matar, 27, was jailed for 25 years earlier this month for attempted murder after repeatedly stabbing Sir Salman on a New York lecture stage. "I was pleased that he got the maximum available, and I hope he uses it to reflect upon his deeds," Sir Salman told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. The attack left the award-winning writer blind in one eye, with damage to his liver and a paralysed hand caused by nerve damage to his arm. Last year, Sir Salman published a book titled Knife reflcting on the attack, which he has described as "my way of fighting back". It includes an imagined conversation with Matar. "I thought if I was to really meet him, to ask him questions, I wouldn't get very much out of him," Sir Salman told Radio 4. "I doubt that he would open his heart to me. And so I thought, well, I could open it by myself. I'd probably do it better than a real conversation would." The fictional conversation was brought to life by BBC film-maker Alan Yentob in an artificial intelligence animation created for a documentary last year. The results were "very startling", Sir Salman said on Monday. "I have to say it certainly made a point." The author was speaking on Radio 4 to pay tribute to Yentob, the BBC's former creative director, who died on Saturday. "Apart from everything that everybody's been saying about him - that he was an unbelievable champion of the arts and so on - he also had a real gift for friendship," he said. "He was a very strong ally in bad times." Sir Salman added: "He was a great programme maker, and I hope that's how he will be primarily remembered." Yentob leaves a "colossal" legacy, he said. "He's one of the giants of British media in the last generation, and I think he will be remembered as a maker of great programmes, as an enabler of great programmes." BBC arts broadcaster Alan Yentob dies aged 78 Alan Yentob: BBC TV's creative giant, on screen and off The pair's personal and professional relationship extended to Yentob famously enlisting Sir Salman to take part in a spoof arm wrestle for a scene in BBC mockumentary W1A. "People keep asking me who won," Sir Salman said. "And of course nobody won because it was complete fraud." In November, the author will publish a short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, his first work of fiction to be written since the stabbing. The attack came 35 years after Sir Salman's controversial novel The Satanic Verses, which had long made him the target of death threats for its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. Rushdie attacker sentenced to 25 years in prison Salman Rushdie to release first fiction since stabbing Salman Rushdie: Losing an eye upsets me every day Salman Rushdie tells court he thought he was dying after stabbing

Nationalism can be a positive or negative force, Salman Rushdie says
Nationalism can be a positive or negative force, Salman Rushdie says

Montreal Gazette

time27-04-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Montreal Gazette

Nationalism can be a positive or negative force, Salman Rushdie says

By In the Hotel 10 basement on Sherbrooke St., security guards inspected a procession of writers, editors and literature lovers as they arrived at a literary roundtable discussion. The security was high because this wasn't just any literary event. One of the panellists, author Salman Rushdie, was attacked with a knife in 2022 as he was about to give a public lecture in New York, leaving him blind in one eye. 'Two and a half years ago was a bad audience,' the 77-year-old author joked at his talk on Saturday afternoon, while wearing his signature glasses with a black-tinted right lens. The Indian-born author was the object of multiple death threats and assassination attempts after the publication of his famous 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. His most recent autobiographical work from 2024, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, recounts the stabbing attack. Rushdie's upcoming novella collection, The Eleventh Hour, is scheduled to be published this fall. Rushdie was in Montreal for the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, where he was awarded the Grand Prix Award for a lifetime of literary achievement and interviewed by longtime CBC Radio host Eleanor Wachtel. The Blue Metropolis Grand Prix is given each year to a world-renowned author, accompanied by a $10,000 grant. Earlier in the day, Rushdie gave a talk with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore around themes of history, dreams and imagination. At the talk, Rushdie discussed his complicated feelings toward growing Canadian nationalism, which has spiked in reaction to annexation threats from the United States. '(It's a) very odd word, 'nationalism,' because there are contexts in which it's been a very positive force. For example, the growth of the nationalist movement in India is what ended up getting rid of the British Empire, and I can see that as a kind of almost entirely positive thing,' he said. 'But there are other parts of the world where nationalism has become associated with more primitive kinds of right-wing politics. So it's mixed. It's a word that you have to be careful about.' Rushdie also spoke about how history offers lessons on staying optimistic, even during challenging times. 'One of the things that the study of history taught me was that there's nothing inevitable about history. You know, history doesn't run on tram lines, and enormous changes are possible at very short notice,' he said. 'In all these changes at short notice ... I think that doesn't necessarily mean things get better, they can get worse. But at least it means that change is constant.' While Rushdie has long explored the lessons of history in his work, he noted that the broader public often fails to do the same. 'To take only recent history, the second election of Donald Trump. If you have the example of the first presidency of Donald Trump, then you should learn from that. But instead, everybody learned the wrong lesson. And now you get all these statements in the press of kind of buyer's remorse, people who voted for Trump regretting it.' The Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival runs until 6 p.m. on Sunday, and will hold both in-person panels at the Hotel 10 as well as online programming.

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