WRITE TO REPLY
Salman Rushdie made a pre-recorded video appearance via Zoom at the Hay literary festival in June in which he announced that: ‘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. … It will be a relatively short book, a couple of hundred pages. 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.’
The event marked Rushdie’s first appearance of any sort since he was attacked in New York last year, resulting in the author spending six weeks in hospital and losing the sight in one eye, among other injuries. Hadi Matar