Author Salman Rushdie stated in Barcelona that “the dark times the world is going through will pass,” because “the constant in history is change.”
Rushdie acknowledged that the global climate is “gloomy,” but maintained that despair cannot guide artistic creation. “History teaches us that nothing is inevitable,” he emphasized. “I’m alive and kicking, and that’s a good thing,” he joked.
He also expressed skepticism about the creativity of artificial intelligence: “AI is not going to do anything original; it will only produce plagiarism.”
“Nothing is written in stone,” Rushdie affirmed. During the promotion of his book Cuchillo, in which he narrates the 2022 attack that almost cost him his life, he warned about the radicalization of young people towards the far right in Europe. “In the UK, there was a demonstration of 150,000 people against immigration,” he pointed out.
Despite this, he insisted on maintaining faith in change: “Things have changed before and will change again.” In his opinion, literature does not transform the world directly, but it can offer “pleasure, beauty, and understanding.”
Rushdie announced that his new fiction book, The Eleventh Hour, composed of five stories, will be published in Spain in 2026 and that he is already working on another novel.
