More than three years have passed since the near-fatal stabbing of Salman Rushdie, and now the acclaimed author is revealing his experience from a fresh perspective.
At the Sundance Film Festival, Rushdie took center stage for the debut of “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” a documentary chronicling the 2022 stabbing attack that almost claimed his life.
“The motivation behind this was that it wasn’t solely about me; there were significant principles involved. I felt it was important for people to witness the reality of a terrorist attack up close,” Rushdie, 78, shared with The Wrap during the festival.
Salman Rushdie at The Variety Studio during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, presented by Audible at Audible Listening Lodge, on January 25, 2026, in Park City, Utah. (Anna Webber/Variety via Getty Images)
Despite losing vision in one eye and sustaining permanent damage to his hand from the 2022 incident, Rushdie has made a deliberate choice to ensure the violence does not impact his writing career.
“I resolved to continue being the writer I have always been,” he affirmed.
“Not to write frightened books, and not to write revenge books. Just go on writing the books I had begun to write. To go on down the road I was on, and that was very much an act of will. I really thought, ‘I’m not going to be diverted in either direction, either the direction of cowardice or anger.’”
Author Salman Rushdie is tended to after he was attacked during a lecture on Aug. 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, N.Y. (AP Photo/Joshua Goodman)
Reflecting on the three years since the attack, Rushdie admitted to a sense of deep unease regarding the current global climate.
He described the rise of radicalism, offering a blunt assessment of the modern world: “Everybody’s gone crazy right now.”
“It’s very hard to have a serious conversation,” he told TheWrap.
Hadi Matar listens during an arraignment in the Chautauqua County Courthouse in Mayville, N.Y., on Aug. 18, 2022. The criminal case against Matar, the man charged with stabbing author Salman Rushdie, involved so much potential evidence that prosecutors need more time to review it, the chief prosecutor said on Sept. 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Joshua Bessex)
The author, whose 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” evoked worldwide protests and Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khamenei to call for his death, said that his near-death experience revealed both humanity’s cruelty and courage.
“I experienced, almost simultaneously, the worst side of human nature — violence led by ignorance, induced by the irresponsible — and on the other hand, the best side of human nature, because the first people who saved my life were the audience,” he
Pakistani demonstrators protest Salman Rushdie in 2007. (Arif Ali/AFP )
Rushdie was stabbed on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in Aug. 2022 before he was slated to give a lecture. Emergency responders airlifted him to a hospital in northwestern Pennsylvania, and he underwent surgery.
He suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye, ultimately losing function of the injured eye. The attacker, Hadi Matar, 27, was sentenced in May 2025 to 25 years in prison, the maximum possible term.
Author Salman Rushdie was stabbed and critically injured on Aug. 12, 2022 during an appearance in New York City. (HERBERT NEUBAUER/APA/AFP)
Rushdie described the 27-second attack as something that dragged him back in time.
“I saw the man in black running towards 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,” Rushdie told “60 Minutes” host Anderson Cooper in April 2024. “I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in this way.”
“My first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was: So, it’s you. Here you are,” Rushdie said. “It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time … back into that distant past in order to kill me.”
In this still image from video, author Salman Rushdie is taken on a stretcher to a helicopter for transport to a hospital after he was attacked during a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, N.Y., on Aug. 12, 2022. (AP Photo)
Despite the injuries and lasting trauma, Rushdie said that he would be continuing his work rather than retreating.
“I’ve always thought that it’s weird that dictators and tyrants are so frightened by writers and poets,” he said.
“Why was (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco frightened of (Federico Garcia) Lorca? Why was Caesar Augustus frightened of Ovid? We’ve got no guns. We have no armies. But what we do is we argue with their ability to control the narrative. That’s what dictators want to do. They want to control the narrative. And writers and artists and journalists contest that, and that makes them dangerous.”
