Nearly six months after he was stabbed during a lecture in New York, author Salman Rushdie will be publishing a new book, “Victory City”, on Tuesday, Reuters reports.
Rushdie, 75, was blinded in his right eye and his left hand was badly injured by the stabbing.
After the attack, Rushdie was treated at a Pennsylvania hospital, where he was briefly put on a ventilator, his agent said last October.
Rushdie's upcoming 15th novel will be published by Penguin Random House and takes the form of a translation of a mythical epic originally written in Sanskrit about the Vijayanagara Empire that ruled over much of the southern end of the Indian subcontinent in the 14th century, according to Reuters.
Since the attack, Rushdie has struggled to write and has suffered nightmares, he told the New Yorker magazine in an interview published this week. He called the man charged with his attempted murder, Hadi Matar, an idiot in the interview.
"All I've seen is his idiotic interview in the New York Post," said Rushdie, "which only an idiot would do."
In the interview which took place days after the attack, Matar said he didn’t think the author would survive.
Matar wouldn’t say if he was inspired by the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989.
“I respect the ayatollah. I think he’s a great person. That’s as far as I will say about that,” Matar replied, noting he only “read a couple pages” of Rushdie’s controversial novel.
The attacker has been incarcerated after pleading not guilty to attempted murder and assault in the August 12 attack on Rushdie.
Rushdie since 1989 has been the target of an Iranian fatwa calling for his murder for allegedly blaspheming Islam and its prophet Mohammed in his book "The Satanic Verses."
In 2012, an Iranian foundation added another $500,000 to the reward for killing Rushdie, raising the total bounty for his death to $3.3 million.
Rushdie spent a decade in hiding after Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued the 1989 fatwa against him for his book.
Although Iran's foreign ministry in 1998 assured Britain that Iran would do nothing to implement the fatwa, current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in January 2005 reaffirmed that Rushdie was considered an apostate whose murder was authorized under Islam.