author Salman Rushdie In the novel by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini called on him to assassinate him in 1989, he spent years declaring Rushdie's novel "Satanic Verses", blasphemy and insults to Islam. Ten years later, Rushdie came into hiding and moved to the United States, where he felt safe. Then, on August 12, 2022, at the Literary Festival in Giottoqua, New York, he was attacked by a knife-wielding attacker. Rushdie was stabbed 15 times and almost died. He lost his right eye in the attack. He reached an agreement on his life's attempts: by writing about it in his latest book. "Knife", published in April 2024.

Rushdie reads several excerpts from "Knife" for 60 minutes.

"I would answer violence with art," said author Salman Rushdie. Initially, he didn't want to write his new book on the attack, The Knife, but he felt he needed to have what happened and refused to be a victim.

He wrote: "No matter what I have written or what I might have written, I will always be the one who is knifed. The knife defines me. I will fight it, but I doubt I will lose."

"Nothing supernatural. There is no 'light tunnel'. Rushdie wrote that in his new book he described his nearly dying experience in 2022. "In fact, I rarely feel tightly connected to my body." My body was dying, and this took me away. ”

"I don't want to use his name in this account," the author wrote. Rushdie used the "knife" to call the attacker "A." According to the New York Post, after the attack, he learned that the attackers had only read a few books, Satanic Scriptures.

"So it's you. You're here." These were Rushdie's first thoughts, at the time a man who stabbed him with a knife.

“The last sentence from Henry James is said to be 'So finally here, it's a brilliant thing.' Death is also the same for me, but it didn't make me stand out.

When Anderson Cooper talked to 60 minutes, Anderson Cooper explained: "It feels like a distant past.

"There is a knife in the eyes. That was the bravest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade stretched all the way to the optic nerve, which meant there was no possibility of preserving vision. It disappeared," Rushdie wrote.

Salman Rushdie's face opened after being stabbed 15 times. In his book The Knife, he writes about what looks like a "special effect of a science fiction movie." He described his eyes as bulging from the socket, hanging down his face like a big boiling egg. "The swelling was so bad that during those days, if I had eyelids. (I did.)" he wrote.

In the days after the attack, he did not recognize his reflection. "The man in the mirror has his lips not moved. There is a diagonal line on the top of his forehead." "Now he is someone outside the mirror, behind him, dark. He is a stranger who must play his role."

When Salman Rushdie intends to testify in court against his attackers, he imagines saying something: “I find that I say very little to you.

"The last thing on my right eye is: I saw the man in black running toward my right side. Black clothes, black mask. His hardship was low," Rushdie wrote in his new book Knife. "I didn't try to run. I was fascinated."

Last month, Salman Rushdie's assailant was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The video above was originally released on April 14, 2024.