Salman Rushdie to publish first fiction book since stabbing

NEW YORK – British-American novelist Salman Rushdie will publish his first major work of fiction since a brutal stabbing that blinded him in one eye, his publisher said on March 27.

The Eleventh Hour is a collection of short stories examining themes and places of interest to Rushdie, who narrowly escaped death during the attack in August 2022. It will be released on Nov 4.

Would-be assassin Hadi Matar was convicted of attempted murder at a trial in upstate New York in February, at which Rushdie gave vivid testimony.

“The three novellas in this volume, all written in the last 12 months, explore themes and places that have been much on my mind – mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America,” Rushdie said in a statement released by Penguin Random House.

“I’m happy that the stories, very different from one another in setting, story and technique, nevertheless manage to be in conversation with one another, and with the two stories that serve as prologue and epilogue to this threesome.”

During the trial of Rushdie’s attacker, Matar’s legal team sought to prevent witnesses from characterising Rushdie as a victim of persecution following Iran’s 1989 fatwa calling for his murder over supposed blasphemy in his book, The Satanic Verses (1988).

Rushdie, 77, told jurors of Matar “stabbing and slashing” him during an event at an upscale cultural centre in rural New York.

Matar, 27, was found guilty of stabbing Rushdie about 10 times with a 15cm blade. He is scheduled to be sentenced on April 23 and faces up to 25 years in prison. 

At the trial, Rushdie discussed his book Knife (2024), which he wrote after the attack, describing the violent attempt on his life and his recovery from a variety of injuries.

Matar, from New Jersey, previously told media he had read only two pages of The Satanic Verses, but believed the author had “attacked Islam”.

After the novel was published in 1988, Rushdie became the centre of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, particularly Islam, was unacceptable in any circumstance.

Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai, India, but moved to England as a boy, was propelled into the spotlight with his second novel Midnight’s Children (1981), which won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India.

But The Satanic Verses brought him far greater, mostly unwelcome, attention. AFP