Sir Salman was stabbed multiple times and suffered severe and life-changing injuries as he prepared to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in 2022, leaving him blind in one eye and unable to use one of his hands. The Satanic Verses writer survived an assassination attempt in 1989, after a fatwa calling for his death was issued by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini in the same year. Support for the death sentence was withdrawn in 1998 by the Iranian government.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life, Sir Salman said that when writing he “hopes it will not get in the way of what I want to do next”, and added that injuries to his eye and hand had made “everything harder”. He said: “Practically, it’s harder because because one eye is harder than two and one hand is harder than two hands, so it makes everything slower. “As far as terms of what I write, I just hope that it doesn’t get in the way of what I want to do next, and now I just want to do something completely different.
” He was asked by presenter John Wilson if he found writing the book Knife, which is based on the attack, “cathartic”. Sir Salman said: “It was not exactly cathartic, but it was a way of handling it, that was a way of dealing with it. “I feel now as if I’ve kind of dealt with the subject.
“I didn’t want to do it and then I discovered that there was no alternative because it was just in the way of everything else. “I thought the only way of getting.
