In an interview with TIME, author Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed more than ten times during a public event in August, 2022, said that he is writing a book – “a couple hundred pages” long – about the attack. He has lost sight in his right eye and his left hand, which was temporary immobile, is making progress towards recovery.
Rushdie said the human body has a “remarkable capacity for healing”. The author has been missing from the public scene since the attack and has done virtually no publicity for his latest novel, Victory City. He said he is taking “very slow steps back into the world” and intends to “reclaim” his life as “fully” as he can.
Apart from physical injuries, Rushdie said that the attack also gave him PTSD. But therapy is helping him get better. Writing a book, for Rushdie, is “a way of kind of taking charge” of what happened. When asked about if he’d go back for a public event soon, the author replied – “I don’t know is the answer. Not anytime soon.”
He also said that he was “really, really fortunate” to finish the work on Victory City before he was attacked. Only publishing the book was remaining. He added that if the book had been at another stage, then it would have been “very hard” to finish it. For the longest time after the attack, writing was something he “couldn’t do”.
When asked about what a day in his life looked like now, Rushdie answered, “I tend to work something like an office day. Maybe the exception is that I always, always, at night before going to bed, read what I wrote that day.”