'Find it difficult to write': Salman Rushdie speaks out after attack; new book Victory City releases today

"There is such a thing as PTSD, you know," said Sir Salman Rushdie in his interview with David Remnick in the New Yorker months after the fatal attack that left him without vision in one eye.

"I've found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it's a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I'm not out of that forest yet, really," he said.

Rushdie says that he is "lucky" and has been told that he is "doing very well." But he still finds it difficult to type or write.

"I was lucky. My main overwhelming feeling is gratitude. I've been better. But, considering what happened, I'm not so bad," he said.

The award-winning novelist was attacked on stage at an event in New York state last August and spent many weeks in hospital. He subsequently lost vision in one eye.

"The big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I'm doing a lot of hand therapy, and I'm told that I'm doing very well," he said.

He said he also has mental scars from the attack and that he is having to rethink his approach to security. Rushdie has lived without security for more than two decades.

Rushdie's new novel, Victory City releases today. David Remnick in his New Yorker feature on the author describes the new novel as being "firmly in the tradition of the wonder tale."

"One of the sparks for the novel was a trip decades ago to the town of Hampi, in South India, the site of the ruins of the medieval Vijayanagara empire. Victory City, which is presented as a recovered medieval Sanskrit epic, is the story of a young girl named Pampa Kampana, who, after witnessing the death of her mother, acquires divine powers and conjures into existence a glorious metropolis called Bisnaga, in which women resist patriarchal rule and religious tolerance prevails, at least for a while," he writes.