Author Salman Rushdie recalled a stabbing at a 2022 literature festival, describing the attacker as “hard and low” like a “squat missile”.Interviewed by CBS News before the release of his book “The Knife: Musings After an Attempted Murder,” Rushdie said his first thought when he saw his attacker was, “So it’s you.”

“I sometimes imagine my assassin showing up in some public forum or something and coming at me that way. So when I saw this murderous figure coming towards me, my first thought was, ‘ It’s you. You’re here’,” the Anglo-Indian novelist said in his first television interview since the attack.

this Booker Prize winner attacked on stage as he prepared to speak at Chautauqua Institution in New York. The attacker was identified as a 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar, who was apparently sympathetic to Shia extremism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Rushdie was stabbed multiple times and lost the sight in one eye and the feeling in some of his fingers.

In the interview, Rushdie said that “the last thing I wanted to see with my right eye” was a man in black “swooping down” like a “crouching missile.”

The Mumbai-born writer, best known for his novel Midnight’s Children, was told by doctors that he was lucky to survive because the man who stabbed him “didn’t know how to kill with a knife”.

Rushdie said one of the surgeons told him, “‘First you’re really unlucky, and then you’re really lucky.’”

“I said, ‘Lucky what?’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s lucky that your attacker didn’t know how to kill a person with a knife,’” the author said.

Rushdie has received numerous death threats since the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses” in 1988. The book is banned in Iran and many Muslim countries and is considered blasphemous.

In 1989, Iran’s late leader Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s execution. The reward for Rushdie’s assassination exceeds $3 million.