“I’ve had quite a good look at it, and it’s not great,” Salman Rushdie joked this evening when asked about death, and whether he feared it, during a sold-out Q&A session at the inaugural Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal.
Rushdie added: “I’d prefer not to.”
The Indian-born British-American novelist can, of course, speak from recent memory. In 2022, Rushdie was on stage at a literary event — a setup not too dissimilar from this evening at the Porto Colloseum — when he was stabbed 15 times by a then 25-year-old man named Hadi Matar.
Matar’s motivation for trying to kill Rushdie, according to the federal indictment, originated from a 2006 speech delivered by Hezbollah’s chief Hassan Nasrallah. In his speech, Nasrallah endorsed a decades-old death warrant placed on Rushdie by Iranian religious leaders in response to his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
After his conviction, Matar admitted to having read only “a couple of pages” of The Satanic Verses, which Iranian religious leaders had denounced as blasphemous. Rushdie told the crowd this evening in Porto that his attacker’s actions and motivations remained deeply “puzzling” to him for some time after the incident.
“How could this young man, growing up in New Jersey, with no criminal record, decide to commit the murder of a stranger?” Rushdie said.
Rushdie works through these questions in his 2024 memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. The book’s last chapter contains a fictional conversation between Rushdie and Matar. The author told the audience in Porto that he had originally planned on visiting Matar in prison to conduct a real-life discussion. Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2025. However, he quickly decided against a visit after discussing his plans with his wife.
“My wife didn’t think that was a good idea,” he joked. “And even if he did agree to it, which he probably wouldn’t, for many reasons, what would I get out of the meeting? He’s not going to open his heart to me. It would’ve been a series of cliches that I could predict anyway. So I thought, I’m a novelist, why don’t I make it up?”
Rushdie added that when the book came out, many of his fellow novelists contacted him to say they thought the fictional conversation was the “best chapter in the book.”
“One or two of the critics thought it was the weakest chapter in the book. That just shows you the problem with critics,” Rushdie joked.
Despite his reputation and recent history, Rushdie told the Portuguese crowd that he isn’t at all interested in overtly political fiction writing.
“I don’t want to write polemical fiction,” he said.
To illustrate his thesis, Rushdie spoke about Jane Austen and how her novels, penned at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, don’t contain any detailed mentions of war.
“That’s because public life and private life were so far apart at that time that she could brilliantly and profoundly explain her characters without needing to refer to the public dimension,” he said, adding that the relationship between the two is much different today.
“Since then, the distance between private life and public life has almost disappeared, so public life now collides with our private lives almost every day, so if you want to write, it seems to me that that dimension needs to be one of the parts of the explanation of your characters. It doesn’t have to be the most important part, but love, work, money, class, religion, all these things are part of how a character is made up.”
Rushdie added: “I think about politics in fiction like that. I want to write fiction that takes into account everything that makes a human being.”
The Babell Literary and Cultural Festival runs until June 29.
