Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, will be published by Penguin Random House on April 16, 2024.

In this memoir, Rushdie recounts the events of August 12, 2022, when he was stabbed repeatedly while on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State, where he was due to deliver a lecture. He was in hospital for six weeks and lost vision in one eye and feeling in some fingertips.

He writes about surviving the attack and recovering from it. “This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,” said Rushdie about writing the book while he was still undergoing recovery.

Rushdie won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children – the novel was also awarded the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary. He has been translated into 40 languages and his 16 works of fiction include Shame, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Quichotte, among others. His most recent novel, Victory City, was published by Penguin Random House earlier this year, but it was written before the attack. Knife will be the first book he has written since the events of last year.