Sir Salman Rushdie ‘pleased’ with attacker’s maximum sentence

Author Sir Salman Rushdie has said he is “pleased” the man who tried to kill him in a knife attack in 2022 has received the maximum possible prison sentence.

Hadi Matar, 27, was jailed for 25 years earlier this month for attempted murder after repeatedly stabbing Sir Salman on a New York lecture stage.

“I was pleased that he got the maximum available, and I hope he uses it to reflect upon his deeds,” Sir Salman told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The attack left the award-winning writer blind in one eye, with damage to his liver and a paralysed hand caused by nerve damage to his arm.

Last year, Sir Salman published a book titled Knife reflcting on the attack, which he has described as “my way of fighting back”.

It includes an imagined conversation with Matar. “I thought if I was to really meet him, to ask him questions, I wouldn’t get very much out of him,” Sir Salman told Radio 4.

“I doubt that he would open his heart to me. And so I thought, well, I could open it by myself. I’d probably do it better than a real conversation would.”

The fictional conversation was brought to life by BBC film-maker Alan Yentob in an artificial intelligence animation created for a documentary last year.

The results were “very startling”, Sir Salman said on Monday. “I have to say it certainly made a point.”

The author was speaking on Radio 4 to pay tribute to Yentob, the BBC’s former creative director, who died on Saturday.

“Apart from everything that everybody’s been saying about him – that he was an unbelievable champion of the arts and so on – he also had a real gift for friendship,” he said. “He was a very strong ally in bad times.”

Sir Salman added: “He was a great programme maker, and I hope that’s how he will be primarily remembered.”

Yentob leaves a “colossal” legacy, he said. “He’s one of the giants of British media in the last generation, and I think he will be remembered as a maker of great programmes, as an enabler of great programmes.”

The pair’s personal and professional relationship extended to Yentob famously enlisting Sir Salman to take part in a spoof arm wrestle for a scene in BBC mockumentary W1A.

“People keep asking me who won,” Sir Salman said. “And of course nobody won because it was complete fraud.”

In November, the author will publish a short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, his first work of fiction to be written since the stabbing.

The attack came 35 years after Sir Salman’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses, which had long made him the target of death threats for its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad.