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Salman Rushdie was stabbed onstage last year. He's releasing a memoir about the attack

Salman Rushdie was stabbed onstage last year. He's releasing a memoir about the attack

Salman Rushdie has written a memoir about the horrifying attempt on his life that left him blind in his right eye and with a damaged left hand

NEW YORK (AP) — Salman Rushdie has a memoir coming out about the horrifying attack that left him blind in his right eye and with a damaged left hand. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” will be published April 16.

“This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,” Rushdie said in a statement released Wednesday by Penguin Random House.

Last August, Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly in the neck and abdomen by a man who rushed the stage as the author was about to give a lecture in western New York. The attacker, Hadi Matar, has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder.

For some time after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa calling for Rushdie's death over alleged blasphemy in his novel “The Satanic Verses,” the writer lived in isolation and with round-the-clock security. But for years since, he had moved about with few restrictions, until the stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution.