Christophe Ono-dit-Biot spoke at length with Salman Rushdie at his home in New York. “His goal was not to become a fearful or vengeful writer.
He doesn't want to stop himself from writing what he wants to write,” he says. The last sentence of the story he published in France is an ideologue: “Words are only winners in France’s war against bigots, puritanism and those who want to burn books,’ Rushdie writes in his new book, “Le Couteau”. The writer and journalist met the author of “Satanic Verses”, for 20 years, the victim in August 2022 of a knife attack which left him with serious after-effects. He says Rushdie regrets absolutely nothing, he repeats that it is a novel that was misunderstood, he talks again about his atheism and he is not affected at all by the threats he has received.