London, United Kingdom — Salman Rushdie said Monday he was “pleased” with the maximum 25-year jail sentence handed to a man who tried to kill him with a knife at a New York cultural centre in 2022. “I was pleased that he got the maximum available, and hopefully he uses it to reflect upon his deeds,” Rushdie told BBC radio in an interview. Hadi Matar was sentenced to 25 years in a New York court on May 16 after being convicted of attempted murder and assault. Video footage played during the trial showed Matar rushing onto stage and plunging a knife into Rushdie in the 2022 attack which left the British-American author blind in one eye. Last year, Rushdie published a memoir recounting the near-death experience called “Knife”, in which he has an imagined conversation with Matar. “If I was to really meet him... I wouldn’t get very much out of him,” Rushdie told the BBC. “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,” said the author, who did not attend the sentencing earlier this month. Rushdie has for decades lived under the shadow of Iran’s 1989 fatwa calling for his murder over alleged blasphemy in his novel “The Satanic Verses”. Matar previously told media he had only read two pages of “The Satanic Verses” but believed the author had “attacked Islam”. Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai but moved to England as a boy, was propelled into the spotlight with the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children” (1981) based in post-independence India. His publisher announced in March that “The Eleventh Hour,” a collection of short stories examining themes and places of interest to Rushdie, will be released on November 4, 2025.
