Rob Freeman, PA Media
Sir Salman Rushdie has said he did not want to attend the talk where he was attacked in 2022 after having a premonition of the incident.
The author suffered life-changing injuries in the knife attack, including the loss of his right eye, while preparing to deliver a speech on free speech in upstate New York.
In his first major television interview since the attack, Mr Rushdie, 76, told Anderson Cooper on CBS programme 60 minutes he had dreamed of a man bearing down on him with a spear in an “amphitheatre” in the days before the event.
“I woke up and I was quite shaken,” he said. “I said to my wife, Eliza, ‘You know I don’t want to go’. Because of the dream. And then I thought, ‘Don’t be silly. It’s a dream’.”
His 1988 book The Satanic Verses has been banned in Iran since it was published as many Muslims view it as blasphemous and its publication prompted Iran’s then-leader Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his death. The Iranian government withdrew support for the death sentence in 1998.
The Indian-born author, who said he had about “half a dozen serious assassination attempts” on his life, was due to speak about safe places for writers at the event in the small town of Chautauqua.
“It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past, in order to kill me,” he said.
On April 21, he will discuss his book and the attack that left him blind in one eye and with a damaged hand as part of a series of events for the Southbank Centre’s Spring Literature and Spoken Word Season.
