Author Sir Salman Rushdie has expressed satisfaction with the 25-year prison sentence handed to the man who tried to kill him in a 2022 knife attack. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Rushdie said he was “pleased that he got the maximum available” and hoped his attacker would “reflect upon his deeds.”

Hadi Matar, 27, was convicted of attempted murder after stabbing Rushdie multiple times on stage at a literary event in New York. The assault left the Booker Prize-winning writer blind in one eye, with liver damage and a paralysed hand due to nerve injury in his arm.

Rushdie has since published Knife, a memoir chronicling the attack and his recovery. The book features an imagined dialogue with Matar. “I thought if I was to really meet him, to ask him questions, I wouldn't get very much out of him,” Rushdie explained. “So I thought, well, I could open it by myself. I'd probably do it better than a real conversation would.”

That fictional conversation was adapted into an artificial intelligence-based animation by BBC film-maker Alan Yentob for a documentary. Rushdie described the results as “very startling,” saying, “It certainly made a point.”

Rushdie also paid tribute to Yentob, the BBC’s former creative director, who passed away on Saturday at age 78. “He was an unbelievable champion of the arts,” Rushdie said, adding that Yentob had a “real gift for friendship” and was “a strong ally in bad times.”

Their friendship extended to a playful moment on screen, when Rushdie appeared in a spoof arm-wrestling scene with Yentob on the BBC comedy W1A. “People keep asking me who won,” Rushdie joked. “And of course nobody won because it was complete fraud.”

Looking ahead, Rushdie will publish The Eleventh Hour, a short story collection, this November — his first fiction release since the attack.

The 2022 stabbing occurred more than three decades after Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses ignited controversy and death threats over its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.