“I’ve found it very difficult to write” – Salman Rushdie speaks for the first time after he was stabbed last year and lost an eye for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses

Author, Sir Salman Rushdie has spoken for the first time after being stabbed last year at an event in New York.

Sir Salman has long faced death threats for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses and a fatwa was issued against him by the Iranian regime.

Many Muslims reacted with fury to it, arguing that the portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad insulted their faith.

He faced death threats and the then-Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa – or decree – calling for Sir Salman’s assassination, placing a $3m (2.5m) bounty on the author’s head.

The fatwa remains active, and although Iran’s government has distanced itself from Khomeini’s decree, a quasi-official Iranian religious foundation added a further $500,000 (£416,000) to the reward in 2012.

The award-winning novelist was attacked on stage ahead of a speech in August and spent six weeks in hospital. The man suspected of stabbing Salman Rushdie, Hadi Matar, has been charged with attempted murder.

Following multiple surgeries and months of recovery, Salman lost vision in one eye and is trying therapy to get sensation in his fingers.

In a wide-ranging interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker published Monday, February 6, the novelist said:

“I’ve been better. But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad, iam lucky my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude”.

“The big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I’m doing a lot of hand therapy, and I’m told that I’m doing very well.”

But he said it was difficult to type and to write due to a lack of feeling in some of his fingertips.

“I’m able to get up and walk around. When I say I’m fine, I mean, there are bits of my body that need constant check ups. It was a colossal attack.”

He said he also has mental scars from the attack and that he is having to rethink his approach to security, having lived without it for more than two decades.

“There is such a thing as PTSD, you know,” he said. “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.”

Remnick asked Sir Salman if he thinks he should have been more on guard after moving to New York in 2000, having previously lived underground for several years?

“Well, I’m asking myself that question, and I don’t know the answer to it,” he said. “I did have more than 20 years of life. So, is that a mistake? Also, I wrote a lot of books.”

Rushdie’s latest novel, Victory City was finished just before the attack and is being published later this week.

“I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” he said. “Then you’re just sitting there saying, ‘somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me’… Which I do sometimes think!”

“But what I don’t think is: That’s what I want people reading the book to think. I want them to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.”

Victory City is Salman’s 21st novel, and the iconic author says he has no intention of allowing what’s happened to destroy him as an artist, to silence him.

“I could write scared books” in reaction, he muses, “a book that shies away from things because you worry about how people will react to them”.