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Watch: Salman Rushdie on the moment he was attacked on stage, and why he felt lonely

Salman Rushdie is a writer. A storyteller.

So when you ask him to tell the story of the day, in 2022, when he was attacked and nearly killed by a young man with a knife, Rushdie paints a vivid picture.

He describes lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, overwhelmed with a singular emotion. It wasn't fear, it wasn't pain. It was extreme loneliness.

"I thought, here I am in the middle of upstate New York, almost in Canada, very far from everyone I love. You know, dying, as I thought. I thought I was dying. Dying in the company of strangers. And that felt ... worse than the dying," he said.

Rushdie writes about the attack in his memoir, Knife. He sat down with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly in NPR's New York bureau recently to talk about what happened that day, his reflections on the fatwa calling for his death decades ago, and finding great love later in life.

Listen to the interview with Rushdie on All Things Considered. Part 1 is airing on Wednesday, April 17 and part 2 airs on Thursday, April 18.

Watch a 30-minute cut of this interview on YouTube here.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mary Louise Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine.
Megan Lim
[Copyright 2024 NPR]
William Troop
William Troop is a supervising editor at All Things Considered. He works closely with everyone on the ATC team to plan, produce and edit shows 7 days a week. During his 30+ years in public radio, he has worked at NPR, at member station WAMU in Washington, and at The World, the international news program produced at station GBH in Boston. Troop was born in Mexico, to Mexican and Nicaraguan parents. He spent most of his childhood in Italy, where he picked up a passion for soccer that he still nurtures today. He speaks Spanish and Italian fluently, and is always curious to learn just how interconnected we all are.
Tsering Bista
Annabel Edwards
Mito Habe-Evans
Mito Habe-Evans (she/her) co-manages NPR's Video team and is responsible for the creative direction and sensibility of NPR videos. She leads the team in its pursuit of projects that are "smart with heart," from the comedic economics explainer series Planet Money Shorts to the short film Senior Spring, a national portrait of teens and guns. She developed NPR's signature documentary style with What Democracy Looks Like and One Nation Under The Sun.