Salman Rushdie will be a guest at the XXXVI edition of the Turin International Book FairFriday 10 May at 6.30 pm, and in a dialogue with Roberto Saviano, will present his new book ‘Knife. Meditations after an attempted assassination (Mondadori, 2024) where for the first time he relives the traumatic events that involved him in the attack of 12 August 2022. Above all, the book also tells the story of the aftermath of the attack: his complicated path towards physical recovery and healing made possible from the love and support of his wife Eliza, his family, doctors, physical therapists and his community of readers around the world.
In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a death sentence, against Rushdie for having written ‘The Satanic Verses’, a novel in which, according to the Iranian leader, the Islamic religion and its prophet were offended. Nearly thirty years after that event, on the morning of August 12, 2022, as he stood on stage at the Chautauqua Institution giving a lecture, a man rushed down the hallway toward him brandishing a knife. What followed was an act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond.