Salman Rushdie is considering facing his suspected attacker in court, the author has said.

The author was stabbed roughly 10 times in an attack in New York state in 2022 which left him blind in his left eye, with US citizen Hadi Matar arrested and charged with attempted murder. Salman has revealed that he is tempted to face down his suspected attacker in court, should the case go to trial.

Speaking to the BBC, the 76-year-old said: “There’s one bit of me that actually wants to go and stand on the court and look at him and there’s another bit of me that just can’t be bothered.”

He added: “I don’t have a very high opinion of him. And I think what is important to me now is that you’re able to find life continuing. I’m more engaged with the business of, you know, getting on with it.”

Matar, 24 at the time of the attack, pleaded not guilty to the charge against him, meaning that a trial will be necessary if this plea remains unchanged.

Salman has said that he is recovering well from the stabbing, but suffers from “crazy dreams”, saying that his therapist “has a lot of work to do”.

The writer was attacked while on stage at an event in Chautauqua, New York, during which he was scheduled to give a talk in the US giving sanctuary to exiled writers.

He was stabbed 10 times and his intended interviewer Henry Reese was also injured. Rushdie was rushed to the hospital by helicopter with wounds to the abdomen, neck, thigh, and right eye, in which he lost vision.

The novelist’s 1988 work The Satanic Verses, in which dream sequences describe a prophet formulating a new religion in the Arabian desert, had been condemned by some Muslims as blasphemous and sparked riots in the Islamic world. Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Salman’s assassination, with a bounty of £2 million placed on his head, prompting the writer to be placed under police protection.

Speaking to the BBC almost a year on from the attempt on his life, Rushdie warned of the threat of religious radicalism, saying: “You’ve got to distinguish between people’s private faith, which is kind of none of our business, really, and the politicisation of any religion.

“In America right now, you’ve got a highly weaponised version of Christianity, which was responsible, in very large part, for the reversal of Roe versus Wade, for the whole abortion debate.

He added: “When it becomes politicised, it becomes everybody’s business, as all political things do. I think we just have to be clear about that distinction."