On August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie (Bombay, 1947) nearly died from the numerous stab wounds inflicted on his face, torso, and limbs by the young Hadi Matar. The author explained the attack, which left him blind in one eye and unable to use his left hand, in Knife (Penguin Random House, 2025), a "horror and survival story" that spurred the novelist to return to his preferred world, that of fiction. The result, The penultimate hour (Penguin, 2026), has just arrived in bookstores with the great anticipation that each new release from the writer provokes..

The man who stabbed British writer Ahmed Salman Rushdie He has been sentenced to 25 years in prison and another five years of supervised release. This Friday, the Chautauqua County Court in New York issued the sentence against Hadi Matar, 27, of New Jersey, more than three months after he was convicted of attempted second-degree murder and assault earlier last year. The judge thus imposed the maximum sentence on Matar that the prosecution had requested, to which must be added 7 years for having attacked the moderator who accompanied the novelist on a conference stage in New York in August 2022. As a result of the attack, the writer was left blind in one hand, blind in one eye, and suffered nerve injuries in his arm.

The writer Salman Rushdie has given his first television interview since he was the victim of a serious attack in August 2022. A man stabbed him more than fifteen times while he was participating in a literary festival near New York. It was a fulfillment of the fatwa proclaimed by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 for how he represented Muhammad and the Koran in The Satanic Verses. A death sentence that haunted him for more than three decades and from which he was saved despite the cruelty of the criminal. Rushdie has lost his right eye and suffers after-effects from his injuries. And now he promotes Knife, the book he has written to talk about this fact.

Emotional and impressive testimony by Nobel Prize winner for literature Salman Rushdie. On the second day of the trial in New York State against Hadi Matar, 27, the man accused of of trying to assassinate him in August 2022, The writer said on Tuesday, in very graphic terms, that he experienced a great shock when he fell to the ground, as a result of the attack and the multiple stab wounds he received – up to a dozen. He recalled that he realized that there was “a lake of blood [around him, on the stage where he was], which was clearly my own blood. I was bleeding profusely, and it was clear to me that I was dying.”

The savage and near fatal knife attack on Salman Rushdie on 12^th August in quiet upstate New York shocked many. It echoed through the global community of writers and readers and well beyond. Rushdie had been about to speak when naked violence plunged into a literary event. It charged brutally into the world of words, thought and imaginative expression. These are more usually spaces of reflection in which violence is parsed, questioned, perhaps mocked, deflected, understood.