Salman Rushdie’s memoir about the stabbing that killed him in 2022, released today in the United States, will be published in Portugal in May, and the author is also scheduled to visit Portugal in September.
The information was provided to Lusa by Dom Quixote, which publishes the work of the 76-year-old British-American writer, who was the victim of a knife attack on the afternoon of August 12, 2022, when he was preparing to give a lecture at a New York university.
The book, which will be launched today in the United Kingdom and the United States, is entitled “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” and will hit the Portuguese book market on May 14, with a translation by J. Teixeira de Aguilar.
According to the publisher, Salman Rushdie is also scheduled to come to Portugal at the end of September, at the invitation of Livraria Lello, in Porto, to take part in the “Author of the Month” initiative, an event that was initially scheduled for September 17, 2022, but was canceled after the attack on the writer.
In this book, released 33 years after the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini following the publication of “The Satanic Verses”, the writer talks for the first time in memorable detail about the traumatic events of that day, which the whole world witnessed.
Since 1989, Salman Rushdie has been living under the threat of death after the fatwa was issued. He had long wondered who was going to kill him, the writer himself revealed in a public statement on April 12, detailing that when he was stabbed, his first thought was “so it’s you!”.
Salman Rushdie was stabbed in August 2022 during a literary conference in Chautauqua, New York, by an American of Lebanese origin, suspected of being a sympathizer of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Seriously injured, the writer later lost an eye and suffered nerve damage in his hand.
The author read an excerpt from his new work for the US television channel CBS News, in a broadcast on April 14.
Born in Bombay in 1947, Salman Rushdie published his first novel – “Grimus” – in 1975.
Author of 15 novels, short stories for young people and essays, he was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 for his book “The Midnight Children”, and was voted the best ever winner of that prestigious literary prize in 2008.
The writer set the Muslim world ablaze with the publication of “Satanic Verses” in 1988, which led the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa ordering his death.
After that, he spent years in hiding and under police protection, but gradually returned to public life after the Iranian government distanced itself from the order in 1998, stating that it would not support any attempt to kill him, although the fatwa was never officially revoked.
His most recent novel, “City of Victory”, completed a month before the attack and released internationally in February 2023, was published in Portugal in September of that year.
