After the writer was stabbed in a horrific attack, his wife started making a video diary of his recovery. The clips are featured in a new film from Alex Gibney, who drew on Dennis Potter to create a powerful portrait of Rushdie’s tumultuous life
Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Photograph: Brigitte Lacombe
‘Ours was a love story, not an attempted murder story’: Rachel Eliza Griffiths on the day her husband, Salman Rushdie, was stabbed
They had only been married for 11 months when the world-famous novelist was attacked by a frenzied knifeman. His wife remembers the intense drama of hearing the news, and the traumatic aftermath
Iwoke early and alone on the sunny morning of Friday 12 August 2022. I was having coffee at the moment my husband, the Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, was nearly killed in a stabbing on stage in Chautauqua, New York.
While the author’s account of the 2022 murder attempt is a courageous defence of free speech, it is also shot through with self-regard, making it a sometimes hard book to admire
Clockwise from top left: A Very Private School by Charles Spencer; Lauren Oyler; Under the Hornbeams by Emma Tarlo; Sathnam Sanghera; The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt; Rose Boyt; Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst; and Salman Rushdie.From Salman Rushdie’s account of the attempt on his life to Sathnam Sanghera’s thoughts on imperialism via the story of the Tory party’s decline, here are the big hitters coming your way next year
What are the trends in new nonfiction? From where I’m sitting, nature writing and major biography appear to be on their way down, history and health are still rising, and every other publisher’s list is littered, somewhat dispiritingly, with what they call genre-defying but I think of as bitty, not-one-thing-or-the-other kinds of books: group biographies of people about whom tons has already been written; collections of essays with no unifying theme; texts that combine fact with a certain kind of fiction in a sometimes rather desperate bid to make the austere and the arcane seem newly “relevant”.
Plenty to smile about ... Salman Rushdie. Photograph: Felix Clay
It's only minutes since I reached the final, typically long and rich sentence of Midnight's Children and closed the covers. It feels like shutting the lid on a magic box. A swirling, overloaded mass of words, colours, smells, allusions and illusions has suddenly been contained. A portal to a fantastical, vital dimension has been sealed off.
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| Salman Rushdie |
The ‘Stand with Salman’ event in New York mirrors a public reading of The Satanic Verses that took place after the fatwa was issued in 1989
Hundreds of writers are to gather in New York this week to read from Salman Rushdie’s works, in a recreation of an event first held after the fatwa on the author was issued in 1989.
Authors including Paul Auster, Tina Brown, Kiran Desai, Amanda Foreman, AM Homes, Siri Hustvedt, Hari Kunzru and Gay Talese will be among those taking part in the “Stand with Salman” event.
The writers will gather on the steps of the New York Public Library on Friday morning, exactly a week after 75-year-old Rushdie was stabbed during an event at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.
The Indian-born British author is currently recovering in hospital. His injuries are “severe”, said his agent Andrew Wylie; he had 10 knife injuries and emerged with a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye. In a separate statement, Rushdie’s son Zafar said the novelist was able to talk and that “his usual feisty and defiant sense of humour remains intact”
Friday’s event is being organised by PEN America, the New York Public Library, Rushdie’s publisher Penguin Random House, and House of SpeakEasy. PEN America said those gathering would “read from selected texts from Rushdie’s body of work”.
The event will be live streamed, and PEN America is asking those unable to attend to show their support by hosting a public reading of Rushdie’s work in their own community. Social media users are encouraged to post videos reading passages of Rushdie’s work using the hashtag #StandWithSalman.
The event is modelled on a public reading of The Satanic Verses held a few days after the fatwa against Rushdie was announced in 1989, which was attended by more than 3,000 people.
The fatwa was issued by the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in response to the publication of The Satanic Verses. Although the Iranian regime has since sought to distance itself from the fatwa, the price on Rushdie’s head was increased in recent years to more than $3m.
Rushdie recently said he believed his life was “very normal again”. He was at the Chautauqua Institution to speak about the importance of America giving asylum to exiled writers, and he had also recently signed a letter expressing “grave concerns about the rapidly worsening situation for human rights in India”.
The man accused of attacking Rushdie, Hadi Matar, has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault.
