Poets & Writers Theater

In this 60 Minutes interview, Salman Rushdie speaks with Anderson Cooper about surviving an attempt on his life in 2022 and detailing the experience in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, 2024).

“Terrorism must not terrorize us. Violence must not deter us. The struggle goes on.” At the 2023 PEN America Literary Gala, Salman Rushdie accepts the PEN Centenary Courage Award and speaks about the urgency to fight book bans and the courage of those who saved him when he was attacked at a public event less than a year ago.

“I’m still in awe of the range of stories and voices that they bring and the worlds that they open up. It’s an incredibly eclectic group.” In this video, Afua Hirsch and fellow members of the judging panel talk about the six books on the 2019 Booker Prize shortlist, which include The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, and Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann.

“One of the things that the novel comes out of is this sense that reality itself is under attack, that the idea of truth itself is under attack. And it actually changed the way I wrote.” Salman Rushdie talks about politics, alternative news, free speech, and his most recent novel, The Golden House (Random House, 2017), on Boston’s WBGH News. “Epic: An Interview With Salman Rushdie” by Porochista Khakpour is featured in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“My desire to be a writer was entirely to do with the love of the power of the imagination, imagining worlds, creating worlds for readers to inhabit.” In this 60 Minutes video, Salman Rushdie speaks about the dangers of censorship, how he would like to be remembered, and what inspires him to keep writing. 

In this 2002 CBS Sunday Morning interview with Martha Teichner, Salman Rushdie discusses living in New York City, his upbringing in India and England, and the controversy over his 1988 award-winning novel, The Satanic Verses.

“I think that the idea that you can separate politics out from life is the first fiction.” Claudia Rankine speaks about the confluence of writing and politics with Tony Kushner and Salman Rushdie in “The Stuff of Fiction,” a panel moderated by David Remnick, the first event in the New Yorker’s Public Forum: A Well-Ordered Nation series.

"What happens if you take the fantastic and the historical and bind them into the same book?" The award-winning author speaks with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about the mix of magic and reality in his latest novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (Random House, 2015).

Yet another film adaptation of an amazing novel! Based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Salman Rushdie and directed by Oscar-nominated Deepa Mehta, Midnight's Children is scheduled to open in theaters on November 2.

According to Salman Rushdie, the key to writing is concentration, not inspiration. He tells the fine folks at Big Think that writing "requires deep attention to your characters, to the world they live in, and to the story you have to tell."