Rushdie gives first interview since attack

Months after being stabbed repeatedly as he prepared to give a lecture, Salman Rushdie is blind in his right eye, struggles to write and, at times, has “frightening” nightmares.

But, he said during his first interview since the attack, he still has a feeling of gratitude.

“Well, you know, I’ve been better,” he told The New Yorker’s David Remnick during an interview published Monday. “But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad.”

“The big injuries are healed, essentially,” he said.

Remnick, who spoke with Rushdie both in person in Manhattan and via Zoom, wrote that the Booker Prizewinning author had lost more than 40 pounds and mostly reads on an iPad so he can adjust the lighting and font size.

“There is scar tissue on the right side of his face,” Remnick wrote. “He speaks as fluently as ever, but his lower lip droops on one side. The ulnar nerve in his left hand was badly damaged.”

Rushdie, 75, lived in hiding for years after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for his death because of the alleged blasphemy of the novel “The Satanic Verses.” But he had long since moved about freely, with minimal security, and did not feel any sense of risk in August about appearing at the Chautauqua Institution, an education and retreat center in western New York.

He was on stage when approached by a young man dressed in black and carrying a knife. The alleged assailant, Hadi Matar, has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder. During his New Yorker interview, Rushdie referred to Matar as an “idiot,” but otherwise said he felt no anger.

“I’ve tried very hard over these years to avoid recrimination and bitterness,” he said.

The interview came out on the eve of the publication of Rushdie’s new novel, “Victory City,” which he completed a month before he was attacked.