The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Salman Rushdie, the acclaimed Indian-born novelist, will write about his experience of surviving and recovering from an attempted assassination attempt last year in a new memoir called Knife.
The book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, will be published April 16, according to his publisher Penguin Random House.
“This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,” said Rushdie in a statement.
Last August, Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly in the neck and abdomen on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State where came to give a lecture. The attacker, Hadi Matar, has pleaded ‘not guilty’ to charges of assault and attempted murder.
The attack left Rushdie blind in one eye and he lost sense in some of his fingertips.
“Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, ‘Knife’ is a powerful, deeply personal, and ultimately uplifting meditation on life, loss, love, the power of art, finding the strength to keep going – and to stand up again,” a press release published by Vintage wrote.
Before this stabbing, Rushdie was subjected to death threats due to alleged blasphemy in his fourth novel The Satanic Verses. After the supreme leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989, Rushdie spent years in hiding, living in isolation with round-the-clock security.
In an interview with TIME while working on the book, Rushdie said he was “taking very slow steps back into the world.”
“I intend to reclaim my life as fully as I can, but slowly does it,” Rushdie said in the interview.
“Knife is a searing book, and a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in a statement. “We are honored to publish it, and amazed at Salman’s determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves.”