Salman Rushdie was stabbed onstage last year. He's releasing a memoir about the attack

Salman Rushdie has a memoir coming out about the horrifying attack that left him blind in his right eye and with a damaged left hand. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” will be published April 16.

“This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,” Rushdie said in a statement released Wednesday by Penguin Random House.

In August 2022, Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly in the neck and abdomen by a man who rushed the stage as the author was about to give a lecture in western New York. The attacker, Hadi Matar, has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder.

For some time after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa calling for Rushdie's death over alleged blasphemy in his novel “The Satanic Verses,” the writer lived in isolation and with round-the-clock security. But for years since, he had moved about with few restrictions, until the stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution.

The 256-page “Knife" will be published in the United States by Random House, the Penguin Random House imprint that earlier this year released his novel “Victory City,” completed before the attack. His other works include the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight's Children,” “Shame" and “The Moor's Last Sigh.” Rushdie is also a prominent advocate for free expression and a former president of PEN America.

Rushdie, 76, did speak with The New Yorker about his ordeal, telling interviewer David Remnick for a February issue that he had worked hard to avoid “recrimination and bitterness” and was determined to “look forward and not backwards.”

He had also said that he was struggling to write fiction, as he did in the years immediately following the fatwa, and that he might instead write a memoir.