'We live in a world where people are more seduced by real life stories than fables'

I think back to the drink I had with Salman Rushdie just a few days before he was attacked in Chautauqua in August 2022; I was introducing him to a New York friend because they belonged to the same downtown club. My pal asked Rushdie what his life was like now; “perfectly ordinary”, Rushdie said. The bad old days were over.

- Erica Wagner

In the green room Rushdie says to me that when his attacker - whom the author does not like to name - lunged for him, he thought simply, “Now? Now?”

At the Hay festival last Sunday, when I ask him how he is these days, he shrugs. “This is as good as it gets,” he says with a smile. In truth, his survival, his thriving, is a kind of miracle. Rushdie writes about the miraculous but does not himself believe in it, which is curious to ponder, as he himself has said. “I'm annoyed about not having a right eye,” he says plainly; he has asked to sit to my right so he can see me more easily as we speak. “But on the whole, I've been very fortunate, and I'm in better shape than maybe I would have expected.”

What is clear is how keen he is to put the past behind him: when the new book comes out, “it will be very nice to have fiction to talk about again, because ever since the attack, really the only thing anyone has talked to me about is the attack.” His feelings are plain. “I'm over it.”

A few weeks before we speak at the festival, his attacker received the maximum sentence - 25 years for attempted murder. Does this bring “closure”, which is the sort of thing we read about in novels?

“The sentence really didn’t bring closure, no,” he says. “Though I was pleased he got the maximum sentence. The closure came more from finishing Knife.” And he speaks of returning to the Chautauqua Institution, where the attack took place on 12 August, 2022. “My wife Eliza and I went back to revisit, as it were, the scene of the crime; that was an important moment to show myself that I was standing up where I fell down.” It only strikes me later that many of us might talk about revisiting, “as it were”, “the scene of the crime”; never do we mean it literally as Rushdie does.