Internationally renowned writer, free speech advocate and Booker Prize-winner Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, KNIFE: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, a gripping account of surviving an attempt on his life 30 years after the fatwa was ordered against him, will be published by Penguin Random House in more than 15 territories on 16 April 2024.
Speaking out for the first time and in unforgettable detail about the traumatic events of 12 August 2022, KNIFE is a powerful, deeply personal and ultimately uplifting meditation on life, loss, love, the power of art, finding the strength to keep going—and to stand up again.
‘This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,’ Salman Rushdie says.
‘KNIFE is a searing book, and a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. We are honoured to publish it, and amazed at Salman’s determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves,’ says Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House.
Penguin will publish in hardback, e-book and audio on 16 April 2024. All rights were acquired from Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency. For further rights information, contact Jennifer Bernstein at The Wylie Agency.
Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children—for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary—Shame, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Quichotte (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019). In June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours and he joined the prestigious Companions of Honour in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in her Platinum Jubilee year. His new novel, Victory City—a tale for our times, styled as an ancient epic and a testament to the power of storytelling—was published globally in February this year to major critical acclaim.