Sir Salman Rushdie has said he is “over” the attack on his life and revealed how writing a ghost story about EM Forster was his way back to creating fiction.
The author said he achieved “closure” over the attack in 2022 after he finished his memoir, Knife, adding that he never wanted to write about himself again.
Rushdie, in his first public appearance since his attacker, Hadi Matar, was jailed for 25 years in May, told the Hay Festival that revisiting the scene of the attack in New York state had also been “an important moment to show myself that I was standing up where I fell down”.
Amid tight security in the small Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye, Rushdie said he was feeling “excellent … this is as good as it gets”.
The 77-year-old, who was stabbed multiple times by Matar, said there were “bits of me that I’m annoyed about, not having a right eye is annoying … but on the whole I’ve been fortunate and I’m better than maybe I would have expected.”
Rushdie, who has been shortlisted for the Booker prize five times and longlisted a further two times, said he had been “really happy to get back” to writing fiction. “It felt like coming home,” he said.
In November, he is set to release The Eleventh Hour, a collection of novellas that he has said would address “mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America, and Goya and Kafka and Bosch as well”.
He told the festival that “spark” for writing fiction — after fearing that he would not be able to following the attack — came in the months between finishing Knife and it being published. “I wanted to write a story inspired by being at Cambridge [University], a kind of campus story. I was at King’s College and one of the great pieces of luck I had was that the other person who was at King’s College was EM Forster,” he said.
“I was 19, he was 91 and I met him a couple of times and it has always stayed with me as a very precious memory. So I thought that maybe I will write about him. And then I sat down to write and the first sentence of the story that came out on the page — I thought, ‘Oh, it’s a ghost story’. So that was my way back.”
Rushdie also spoke about his new acceptance that the group of writers he was bracketed with in the 1980s — including Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Angela Carter — were a golden generation, adding that the scale they sought in their novels seemed to have disappeared.
He said that at the time the writers had all “resisted … people putting us in the same box”. He said: “We all said no, we’re not a generation. We’re just a bunch of different people doing different things. Now I think that was quite a generation.
“I have a feeling that readers in the late 1970s through the 1980s wanted something unusual. And we all benefited from that interest among readers. I have a sense that a lot of writing now is smaller; its scale is smaller. I don’t know if people are happy to read at that length any more.”
He reiterated his belief in freedom of speech and warned the younger generation to be more tolerant of views with which they did not agree. “I think we do live in a moment when people are a little bit too eager to prohibit speech they disapprove of. That’s a very slippery slope and I would recommend to any young people out there: think about it.”
The author, who was made a Companion of Honour by the late Queen, did, however, question the value of artificial intelligence in the creative field. He said a friend had asked ChatGPT to “write a couple of hundred words … it was absolutely terrible. One of the things that is terrible about it is that it has no sense of humour. If there is a moment when there is a funny book written by ChatGPT then I think we are screwed. That is how we will know, when it makes you laugh,” he said.
