Salman Rushdie, a British-American novelist, released his memoir "Knife" on Tuesday, chronicling his experience of being stabbed at a public event in 2022 and how he survived the near-fatal tragedy.
Rushdie lost sight in one eye after being attacked by a knife-wielding attacker who stormed on stage at an arts event in New York.
The Indian-born novelist, a naturalized American resident in New York, has received death threats since Iran's supreme leader pronounced his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" blasphemous.
In an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" show, which was released ahead of its Sunday broadcast, Rushdie told how one of the doctors who saved his life commented, "First you were really unlucky, and then you were really lucky."
"I asked, 'What's the lucky part?'" and he responded, "Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you didn't know how to kill a man with a knife." Rushdie stated this in one passage.
The knife attack "was a pretty harsh and sharp reminder" of the fatwa declared against him, he remarked in October 2023 at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest publishing trade show.
Rushdie, 76, stated that the attack was "somewhat surprising" because "the temperature had cooled off."
"I'm simply glad I'm still here to say so. It was close."
The award-winning novelist was stabbed numerous times in the neck and abdomen at a literary convention in New York before participants and guards apprehended the attacker.
His attacker, an American in his twenties with Lebanese ancestry, told the New York Post that he had only read two chapters of Rushdie's work but felt he had "attacked Islam."
Rushdie received several death threats throughout the years, cementing his status as a global icon of 'free expression.