Salman Rushdie Doesn’t Want to Be Your ‘Free Speech Barbie’
“It’s a subject I’m anxious to change,” the author Salman Rushdie told the Atlantic staff writer George Packer at the New Orleans Book Festival on Friday. If you know anything about Rushdie, and you probably do, the subject he’s referring to is obvious. In 2022, Rushdie was publicly attacked onstage, and nearly stabbed to death, in front of an audience at the Chautauqua Institution, in New York—all because he wrote a book.
Rushdie has been living under mortal threat ever since Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the murder of the writer, in 1989. The theocratic ruler’s objection was that Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was offensive to Islam, and therefore punishable by death. Over years spent in hiding and many more living openly, Rushdie has become a physical manifestation of free expression—a role with which he seemed mildly annoyed at the book festival, sardonically calling himself “Free Speech Barbie.”
“I don’t feel symbolic,” he told Packer in front of a full crowd. “I feel actual. I feel like I’m a working writer trying to make his work,” he said. “When you’ve written 23 books, it’s a little frustrating to be known not even for a book, but for something that happened to a book in 1989—when that was my fifth published book and this is my 23rd. Can we please talk about books? I keep trying to say.”
[Read: All because Salman Rushdie wrote a book]
Yet Rushdie hasn’t shied away from expressing himself on the subject; he served as the president of the free-speech organization PEN America from 2004 to 2006, and in 2024 he published a memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. When pressed by Packer, he spoke about literary censorship in all of its forms. “Historically,” he said, “attacks on free expression have come from the rich and powerful, and the religious.” But sometimes the squashing of speech can appear in other guises. “Coming from a more liberal background, there now seems to be a different kind of problem. One is self-censorship—I think particularly if you’re a young writer now,” worried about opprobrium for unpopular opinions or cultural appropriation. (Age can apparently be a salve to this: “I’m so old I don’t give a damn,” he joked.)
Rushdie’s festival appearance was tied to a happier occasion, and one he was happier to talk about: A short-story collection published in November, The Eleventh Hour, representing the first fiction he’s written since he was gravely injured in the attack. (His 2023 novel, Victory City, had been completed before the incident.) Rushdie described the relief he felt when he was able to return to his craft. “After I finished writing the memoir, almost immediately, it’s like a door in my head opened and the stories came back,” he said. “I’d been really worried that I wouldn’t be able to write fiction anymore,” he added, “because of trauma and the shocking impact of what happened.”
His new stories draw inspiration from a cast of characters that perhaps only Rushdie could summon in a single book: Franz Kafka, Francisco Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Dickens, Alan Turing, and quite a few others. He also teased his current preoccupation with a more obscure figure, possibly the subject of his next project. Enheduanna, a high priestess from Sumer who is credited with being the first person to sign her work, seems to be a fitting obsession for a writer who knows the stakes of authorship.