'I remember thinking, this is the end': Salman Rushdie reveals how knifeman left him lying in a 'lake' of his own blood after 30-second frenzy at New York book fair two years ago

Salman Rushdie has revealed he thought 'this is the end' as he lay in a 'lake' of his own blood after being viciously stabbed multiple times at a book fair two years ago.

The Indian-born British author, who was left fighting for his life after being attacked at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state, says it was 'good fortune' that means he survived his grievous injuries.

The 76-year-old lost his right eye following the attack, while also being stabbed in the face, neck, chest, abdomen, thigh and hand in the assassination attempt in front of horrified audience members on August 12, 2022.

The novelist said frenzied knifing, which lasted around 30 seconds, came 'out of the blue' despite having been the subject of death threats since the 1980s over his book The Satanic Verses.

He previously told how when he saw the man who attacked him approaching him on stage he initially thought 'so it's you, here you are' and recalled how memories of the attack 'upset me every day'.

Salman Rushdie says he thought 'this is the end' after he was stabbed on stage at a book fair in New York two years ago. Pictured: Mr Rushdie at the Vaclav Havel Center in New York in November, 2023

It took 27 seconds for festival goers and festival staff to drag Rushdie's attacker off him during the incident. Pictured: Security staff and first aiders crowd round Mr Rushdie after the assault

He told Sky News programme Speaking to The World with Yalda Hakin that the attack was an 'unpleasant experience' and he 'quite clearly' thought he was dying.

Mr Rushdie said he remembered 'lying on the floor in a substantial lake of blood, and I clearly remember thinking this was about to be the end', but 'fortunately, I was wrong'.

He said: 'Fortunately he missed a lot of places that would have been immediately fatal. Although there was a big cut across my neck, he didn't get the artery.

'Although there were three injuries to my torso, he didn't reach the heart - in that sense, it was a piece of good fortune in the middle of an unpleasant experience.'

He was speaking after the publication of his 22nd book, the memoir Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, in which he talks about the attack and the impact it has had on him.

He said he felt releasing a book about his experience was his way of 'regaining control the narrative' about his life. 

It was the release of his fourth book, The Satanic Verses, drew heavy criticism for the suggested contradiction of the prophet Mohammed's infallibility and was banned in a number of countries.

Then in 1989, the then supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared a $3million fatwa contract on his life for the 'blasphemy' contained in the book, which sent the writer into hiding for 10 years.

Before the 2022 knife attack, Mr Rushdie's police minders alerted him to half a dozen serious assassination attempts from state-sponsored terrorists before Iran called off its attempts in 1998.

The author spent eight hours in surgery, 18 days in hospital, and three weeks in rehabilitation after being airlifted to hospital from New York's Chautauqua Amphitheater

Sir Salman's wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths (pictured together), chartered a private plane to reach him after the attack

The Indian-born author had a $3million fatwa placed on his head and endured at least six state-sponsored assassination attempts after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988

But the fatwa remains in place and a lone wolf nearly claimed the prize after Mr Rushdie accepted an invitation to speak at the Chautauqua Amphitheater in August 2022.

Mr Rushdie told Sky News he had done many public speaking events before this particular booking and there had 'never been a hint of trouble before', with the attack itself coming 'out of the blue'.

Rushdie's account of the attack has been published by Penguin Random House 

His alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, 26, was dragged off the stage by stewards and has been held without bail at the Chautauqua County Jail as he awaits trial.

His trial was postponed at the start of this year after Matar's lawyer argued that he was entitled to see a what Mr Rushdie had written in his book about the attack before jurors were sworn in as it may contain evidence that could be used in court. 

Mr Rushdie previously told the BBC the attack still 'upsets me every day'.

He said: 'I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way,' he wrote. 

'So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, 'So it's you. Here you are'.'

He nearly pulled out after having a dream two nights earlier in which he was being violently attacked.

Perhaps spurred unconsciously by the venue's name, he found himself dreaming that he was in a Roman gladiatorial arena.

His alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, admitted he had only read two pages of the book which had so outraged the Iranian clerics 

Salman Rushdie described how his attacker slashed his throat during the assassination attempt that cost him an eye and nearly killed him in August 2022

'It was just somebody with a spear stabbing downwards, and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him,' he told CBS.

The dream was so vivid he thrashed around in his bed trying to escape, waking his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who had to wake him in turn and reassure him.

'I was quite shaken by it,' he told the BBC, 'and I said to Eliza, I don't want to go.

'And then you wake up a bit more, and you think, it's just a dream, and you're not going to allow your life to be ruled by something that happened in a dream. And so I thought, I'll go. It's a gig.'

He brushed his fears aside but discovered that there was no security as he took to the stage to deliver a lecture on the importance of protecting writers whose lives are under threat.

'In the corner of my right eye — the last thing my right eye would ever see — I saw the man in black running towards me down the right-hand side of the seating area,' he writes in his book.

But he did not see the knife and thought, at first, that he'd just been punched.

'I think he was just wildly, you know, flailing around,' Rushdie said.

But then he saw a pool of blood 'spreading out from my body', and realised that his right eye was 'kind of hanging out of my face, sitting on my cheek, I've said like a soft-boiled egg. And blind'.

'I remember thinking that I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was quite matter of fact. It wasn't, it wasn't like I was terrified of it or whatever.'

Author Salman Rushdie has described his 256-page memoir as 'a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art' after the attack in August 2022

Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses sparked worldwide protests among Muslims outraged at its alleged 'blasphemy' 

Pakistani activists of Jamiat Tulba Arabia, a student wing of Jamaat-i-Islami party, shout slogans in front of a burning effigy of Salman Rushdie in Multan on June 17, 2007 

It was 27 seconds before festival staff managed to pull the attacker off the then 75-year-old.

Mr Rushdie said: 'That's quite a long time. That's the extraordinary half-minute of intimacy, you know, in which life meets death.'

The author was airlifted to hospital where he underwent eight hours of emergency surgery before being placed on a ventilator, unable to speak.

He said he felt a 'profound sense of loneliness' at the prospect of dying away from his family, but recovered because 'A part of me, some battling part deep within simply had no plan to die'.

After 18 days in hospital and three weeks of rehabilitation, Rushdie was discharged.

One of his surgeons told him that he was both really unlucky and really lucky.

'I said, 'What's the lucky part?' And he said, 'Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife',' Rushdie said.

Mr Rushdie is likely to see Matar again in person when he eventually comes to trial but has refused to name him in his new book.

'He and I had 27 seconds together, you know? That's it,' Rushdie told 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper.

'I don't need to give him any more of my time.'

The author has always fought against being defined by the attempts on his life and was reluctant to turn his pen on the attack that nearly killed him until he decided it might help him come to terms with it.

'I need to focus on, you know, to use the cliché, the elephant in the room,' he said.

'And the moment I thought that, kinda something changed in my head. And it then became a book I really very much wanted to write.

'I mean, language is a way of breaking open the world. I don't have any other weapons.'