Acclaimed writer Salman Rushdie will release a new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, on Apr. 16, 2024.

The book is a gripping account of his survival of the 2022 attack on his life that took place in western New York state, as he was about to give a lecture on artistic freedom. After being stabbed multiple times in the neck and torso, he lost sight in one eye and one of his hands is incapacitated.

"This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art," Rushdie says in a press statement. The memoir dives back into his traumatic experience in great detail and ruminates on loss, love, art and finding the courage to stand up again.

The 2022 attack happened some 30 years after Rushdie was condemned to death by the first supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. He issued a fatwa, an official ruling on a point of Islamic law made by an authority figure, calling for the death of anyone involved in the publication of Rushdie's 1988 satirical novel, The Satanic Verses.

Almost immediately after, he went into hiding in England and remained there for almost a decade. He made a secret visit to Canada in 1992 for a PEN Canada gala in the hopes of garnering enough international attention to start mobilizing political support.

Rushdie has written 15 novels, including Midnight's Children, which won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker, one collection of short stories, five works of nonfiction and co-edited two anthologies. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a former president of PEN American Centre. He was knighted in 2007 for his contributions to literature.

Knife will be published by Knopf Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

"Knife is a searing book, and a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. We are honoured to publish it, and amazed at Salman's determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves," says Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, in a press statement.

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. Rushdie wrote at length, and in the third person, about the fatwa in his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton.

"This doesn't feel third-person-ish to me," Rushdie said of the 2022 attack in the magazine interview. "I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that's a first-person story. That's an 'I' story."