Rushdie to write book about being stabbed on stage

Salman Rushdie is writing a book about being stabbed on stage in New York last year, which left him without sight in one eye. 

The Satanic Verses (Vintage) author made a pre-recorded zoom appearance at this weekend’s Hay Festival, where he received the Medal for Prose. He told audiences: “I’m trying to write a book about the attack on me – what happened and what it means, not just about the attack, but around it.” Earlier this year he hinted at a potential sequel to his memoir Joseph Anton (Vintage).

He said it will be “a relatively short book, a couple of hundred pages”, adding “it’s not the easiest book in the world to write but it’s something I need to get past in order to do anything else. I can’t really start writing a novel that’s got nothing to do with this… So I just have to deal with it.”

He said he was “doing OK” and was “gratified” by the positive response to his latest book Victory City (Jonathan Cape). “I never take anything for granted,” he said. “Most people seem to like the book and that means a lot.” 

Author Malorie Blackman, who was children’s laureate from 2013 to 2015, also made an appearance at the festival, calling for libraries to be “ringfenced and protected” to ensure that all children have access to books.

She said: “I wouldn’t be talking to you now if it wasn’t for my local library. Libraries being closed and librarians being laid off, it’s such a wrong thing to do. This government’s always talking about social mobility, equalising, making a level playing field between people. Well, one of the things that should be ringfenced and protected then is libraries.

“Libraries saved my life. They are the reason I became a writer. The librarians got to know me and they recommended books like Jane Eyre, saying ’read this’. And so it just breaks my heart that they’re not available.”

Blackman was speaking on a panel with Stormzy, who established #Merky Books five years ago to publish books by under-represented writers. He told audiences it was important the imprint covered all genres, publishing works by Blackman and Derek Owusu among many others.  

Stormzy said: "The reason I wanted all these various memoirs, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, is Black people are not monolithic, we are multi-faceted. Growing up where I was… people think, OK, you’re a young black boy that raps, that’s what you do.

"And it’s like, no. There are days when I’m really angry… days when I feel on top of the world… even with literature, we are multi-faceted."

Earlier, the pop star Dua Lipa told a Hay audience that reading Blackman’s book Noughts and Crosses (Corgi Children’s) as a 10-year-old “kickstarted" her love of reading. This year she started her Service95 book club for fans. The first choice is the Booker prize-winning Shuggie Bain (Picador), by the Scottish author Douglas Stuart.