British author Salman Rushdie said he finds it “very difficult” to write after being stabbed last year, in an interview published on Monday ahead of the release of his new novel “Victory City.”
Rushdie, whose “epic tale” of a 14th-century woman who defies a patriarchal world to rule a city hits US shelves on Tuesday, said the attack had scarred him mentally.
“There is such a thing as PTSD you know,” the 75-year-old told the New Yorker magazine in his first interview since the August 12 stabbing at a conference in Chautauqua in upstate New York.
“I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really,” he added.
The award-winning novelist, a naturalised American who has lived in New York for 20 years, lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand, his agent said in October.
Rushdie told journalist David Remnick that “big injuries are healed” but he was not able to type very well because of a lack of feeling in some fingertips.
“I’ve been better. But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad,” said the Indian-born author, describing himself as “lucky.”
Rushdie lived in hiding for years after Iran’s first supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered his killing for what he deemed the blasphemous nature of “The Satanic Verses,” published in 1988.
The attack shocked the West but was welcomed by extremists in Muslim countries such as Iran and Pakistan. (NewArab)