Salman Rushdie said he’s tired of being everyone’s “free speech Barbie” four years after the author survived an assassination attempt that left him blinded in his right eye.
“It’s a subject I’m anxious to change,” Rushdie said Friday during a talk with the Atlantic’s George Packer at Tulane University’s New Orleans book festival. “I don’t feel symbolic.
“I feel actual. I feel like I’m a working writer trying to make his work.”
The Indian-born, British-American Rushdie’s comments came nearly four years after the August 2022 lecture at New York’s Chautauqua Institution where a knife-wielding attacker stabbed him while he was on stage.
Rushdie suffered critical wounds to his liver, intestines and right eye – out of which he can no longer see – during an attack aimed at him for having written The Satanic Verses, which Iranian religious leaders denounced as blasphemous.
The attacker, Hadi Matar, was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempting to murder Rushdie. Matar was also sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for wounding Ralph Henry Reese, who was moderating Rushdie’s Chautauqua talk.
Rushdie’s attempted assassination generated significant news media interest. And while speaking with Packer he admitted “it’s a little frustrating to be not known for a book – but for something that happened to a book”.
“That was my fifth published book,” the 23-time author said of The Satanic Verses, for which the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa – or death warrant – on Rushdie’s life in 1989. “‘Can we please talk about books?’ I keep trying to say.”
To that end, Rushdie on Friday was discussing his short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, which was published in November. It marked the first fiction work Rushdie had written since Matar tried killing him.
The author said he felt relief at being able to write fiction again after having published a memoir of his attempted assassination, Knife, in April 2024.
“After I finished writing the memoir, almost immediately, it’s like a door in my head opened and the stories came back,” Rushdie said. “I’d been really worried that I wouldn’t be able to write fiction anymore … because of trauma and the shocking impact of what happened.”
Although Rushdie said he does not want to be known for the violence against him, he has embraced championing the kind of free speech that the fatwa issued on his head sought to silence – including by serving two years as president of PEN America, a leading writers’ advocacy group.
“Historically,” Rushdie remarked, “attacks on free expression have come from the rich and powerful, and the religious.
“Coming from a more liberal background, there now seems to be a different kind of problem. One is self-censorship” of potentially unpopular opinions – or over worries about cultural appropriation.
“I think [that’s the case] particularly if you’re a young writer now”, Rushdie said.
Rushdie said he has no such self-censorship worries himself.
“I’m so old,” he said, “I don’t give a damn.”
