Nigella Lawson praises Salman Rushdie's new book about knife attack (2024)

Nigella Lawsonhas lavished praise on Salman Rushdie's new book, saying she rushed out to buy her close friend's latest 'profound' work, which recounts the New York knife attack that blinded his right eye, as soon as she could.

Currently in Australia, the TV chef, 64, said she made the most of the time difference - Sydney is nine hours ahead of the UK - to pick up a copy at a favourite book store in the city, and said she didn't stop reading until she'd finished the whole book.

The book, Rushdie's 22nd, is called Knife:Meditations After an Attempted Murder, and recounts theassassination attempt made on his life while he was on stage at a New York literary festival in August 2022.

The 'frenzied' attack saw the 76-year-old stabbed 15 times; he lost an eye and revealed afterwards that he thought he would die at the hands of the knifeman.

Rushdie spentmore than a decade in hiding after his 'blasphemous' 1988 novel The Satanic Verses led a Muslim leader to put a Fatwa on his head.

Nigella and Rushdie have been friends for over 40 years, and the cook revealed in 2021 thatMI5had once stormed her kitchen after mistakenly fearing there had been an 'assassination attempt' onRushdie's life.

In an interview with The Sun, she recounted the bizarre tale, which unfolded after she invited her friend to dinner, and intelligence officers came along too.

She said at the time: 'I’ve known Salman Rushdie since I was 23, and when he had to go into hiding because he had the Fatwa, he came to have dinner with me when I lived in a very little flat.

'Special Branch, who were protecting him, had to go and sit in my bedroom and wait there. When I was cooking, something went wrong with my oven and it kind of blew up, and I ended up looking like Lucille Ball.'

She added: 'I had black-brown cheeks and of course Special Branch obviously thought there had been some sort of assassination attempt on him in my house. They all then stormed into the kitchen in an instant, so that probably is one of the worst blunders.'

Nigella, who spends several months of the year in Australia, made getting her friend's latest literary release a priority, she posted today.

She said: 'Time differences being what they are, Tuesday the 16th came earlier here in Australia. This is hardly significant in itself, but since this is the publication date of by Salman Rushdie, in this regard it’s of supreme importance.'

Nigella continued: 'So I rushed to the @pottspointbookshop this morning, started reading, and couldn’t stop till I finished. It is an absolutely stunning piece of writing: the ugliest thing turned into the most beautiful. No words of mine can do it justice. But I do have to say that it’s such a profound love story, too.'

In interviews this week ahead of the book's release, Rushdie has revealed he was shaken by a ‘premonition’ of being stabbed by a Roman gladiator just two days before the knife attack that nearly killed him.

He said the attack two years ago still ‘upsets me every day’.He writes about the attack in the book, saying: 'I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way.

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

Rushdie spent years living under 24-hour police protection after the publication of his 1988 novel, which was inspired in part by the life of the Prophet Mohammed.

The Indian-born author spent ten years in hiding after Iran placed a $3million fatwa contract on his life for the ‘blasphemy’ contained in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

His police minders alerted him to half a dozen serious assassination attempts from state-sponsored terrorists before Iran called off its attempts in 1998.

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

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.

‘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 realized 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.’

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

‘That's quite a long time,’ Rushdie said. '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.

His attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, was dragged off the stage by stewards and has been held without bail at the Chautauqua County Jail as he awaits trial.

Born in California to Lebanese parents he was found with a false driving license in the name of two Hezbollah commanders when he was seized, admitting he had only read two pages of the book which had so outraged the Iranian clerics.

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.’