Salman Rushdie is determined to have the last word | Tim Adams

The novelist is still recovering from a knife attack last summer, but the loss of an eye won't stop him writing about it

The world," Salman Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses, is the place we prove real by dying in it." Happily, defiantly, the author, 75 and among the greatest of all living make-believers, is not ready just yet to test that theory. Reading his interview with David Remnick in the New Yorker last week, the first he has given since he was attacked on stage last August - stabbed 15 times in the face and neck and chest and hands - was to be reminded of some of the darker ironies of his existence.

In the years since he came out of hiding after the 1989 fatwa and moved to New York, Rushdie had begun, he noted, to evoke frustration, even ridicule for trying to live normally, as if he'd been exaggerating the threat all along. People didn't like it," he told Remnick, because I should have died... Not only did I live, but I tried to live well."