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

VPM | By Mary Louise Kelly, Megan Lim, William Troop, Nickolai Hammar, Tsering Bista, Annabel Edwards and Mito Habe-Evans

Published April 17, 2024 at 1:18 PM EDT

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.

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Mary Louise Kelly

Mary Louise Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine.

Previously, she spent a decade as national security correspondent for NPR News, and she's kept that focus in her role as anchor. That's meant taking All Things Considered to Russia, North Korea, and beyond (including live coverage from Helsinki, for the infamous Trump-Putin summit). Her past reporting has tracked the CIA and other spy agencies, terrorism, wars, and rising nuclear powers. Kelly's assignments have found her deep in interviews at the Khyber Pass, at mosques in Hamburg, and in grimy Belfast bars.

Kelly first launched NPR's intelligence beat in 2004. After one particularly tough trip to Baghdad — so tough she wrote an essay about it for Newsweek — she decided to try trading the spy beat for spy fiction. Her debut espionage novel, Anonymous Sources, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. It's a tale of journalists, spies, and Pakistan's nuclear security. Her second novel, The Bullet, followed in 2015.

Kelly's writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Washingtonian, The Atlantic, and other publications. She has lectured at Harvard and Stanford, and taught a course on national security and journalism at Georgetown University. In addition to her NPR work, Kelly serves as a contributing editor at The Atlantic, moderating newsmaker interviews at forums from Aspen to Abu Dhabi.

A Georgia native, Kelly's first job was pounding the streets as a political reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1996, she made the leap to broadcasting, joining the team that launched BBC/Public Radio International's The World. The following year, Kelly moved to London to work as a producer for CNN and as a senior producer, host, and reporter for the BBC World Service.

Kelly graduated from Harvard University in 1993 with degrees in government, French language, and literature. Two years later, she completed a master's degree in European studies at Cambridge University in England.

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