NEED TO KNOW
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The author and poet spoke to PEOPLE about a new documentary that examines the 2022 attack on Rushdie and its aftermath
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The Booker Prize-winning author was stabbed onstage during a literary festival in Chautauqua, N.Y.
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The film draws from Rushdie’s 2024 memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Salman Rushdie and his wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, are reflecting on the attack that blinded him in one eye — and how survival has led to “resilience.”
In 2022, the Booker Prize-winning author was stabbed onstage during a literary festival in Chautauqua, N.Y. He sustained 18 wounds in total and as a result of the attack, was blinded in his right eye and left unable to fully use his right hand.
Speaking to PEOPLE at the 13th Annual DOC NYC Visionaries Tribute Luncheon on Wed., November 11, at Gotham Hall in Midtown Manhattan, the couple spoke about the new documentary, which charts the attack and its aftermath, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie.
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Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Credit: Neilson Barnard/Getty
The documentary, directed by Alex Gibney, is based on Rushdie’s 2024 memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Griffiths has also written about the attack, in her 2026 memoir, The Flower Bearers.
Speaking about the documentary, Rushdie, 79, said revisiting the experience was cathartic.
“I guess we both discovered resilience,” he said of he and his wife. “We discovered that we had the ability to get through it.”
Griffiths, 47, added that filming the documentary allowed the two to learn more about love.
“I think love is the way that all of us survive things we think we can’t endure,” she said.” Love will give you the strength and the freedom and the liberation to go through a lot of things, and we’ve been through a lot.”
Rushdie added: “I also think it’s kind of nice that a movie which people might think is a true crime story ends up being a love story. That’s a nice surprise for people.”
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Griffiths, who married Rushdie on Sept. 24, 2021, is also a cinematographer on the film, and she shot footage in Rushdie’s hospital room following the attack.
Rushdie first became the target of violence after the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which was deemed blasphemous by some due to its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammed. The author was forced into hiding for a decade after Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for his death by issuing a fatwa against him.
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