Salman Rushdie: My attacker came in hard and low like a squat missile

Sir Salman Rushdie has described the moment he saw his would-be killer “coming in hard and low - a squat missile” before he was stabbed more than a dozen times in a lecture hall in 2022.

In his first television interview about the attack, the novelist said he had sometimes envisioned a killer striking in a public place, and his immediate thought was: “So it’s you. Here you are.”

The Booker Prize winner was told by doctors he was lucky to escape with his life, saying the man who stabbed him “had no idea how to kill a man with a knife”.

Sir Salman, 76, was attacked 33 years after a $3 million bounty was put on his head by the then supreme ruler of Iran, who accused him of insulting Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

His account of the stabbing and his recovery, called Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, will be published next week.

The author lost his right eye in the attack by Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old American of Lebanese descent who had expressed support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on social media.

He was about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state when he saw movement in the audience, he told Anderson Cooper of CBS’s 60 Minutes show.

“I was seated at stage right,” he said, reading an extract from the book. “Then, in the corner of my right eye – the last thing my right eye would ever see – I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low. A squat missile.

“I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, ‘So it’s you. Here you are’.”

He told Cooper that after decades of living in New York without any security, believing the threat to him had faded: “It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past, in order to kill me”.

Sir Salman spent six weeks in hospital after the attack, which also left him with facial scars, a partially paralysed lower lip and a badly damaged left hand.

He recounted: “One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, ‘First you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky’. I said, ‘What’s the lucky part?’ and he said ‘Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife’.”

The attack on him lasted 27 seconds and only ended when members of the public tackled the knifeman, who was arrested at the scene.