The author suffered life-changing injuries in the knife attack, including the loss of his right eye while preparing to deliver a talk on free speech in upstate New York.

In his first major television interview since the attack, Rushdie, 76, told Anderson Cooper on US TV program 60 minutes he had dreamed of a man bearing down on him with a spear in an "amphitheatre" in the days before the event.

"I woke up and I was quite shaken," he said on the CBS program.

"I said to my wife, Eliza, 'You know I don't want to go'. Because of the dream. And then I thought, 'Don't be silly. It's a dream'."

His 1988 book The Satanic Verses has been banned in Iran since it was published as many Muslims view it as blasphemous and its publication prompted Iran's then-leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his death.

The Iranian government withdrew support for the death sentence in 1998.

The Indian-born author, who said he was subject to about "half a dozen serious assassination attempts", was due to speak about safe places for writers at the event in the town of Chautauqua.

"It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past, in order to kill me," he said.

"I think he was just slashing. It was the half-minute of intimacy between life and death. I was watching (blood) spread and then thinking I was probably dying. It was quite matter of fact.

"I've not had a revelation except there is no revelation to be had."

He said one of the surgeons who saved his life told him he was really unlucky and then he was really lucky.

"I said, 'what's the lucky part?' and he said, 'Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife'."

He does not name his alleged attacker - a 24-year-old man from New Jersey named Hadi Matar, who has is awaiting trial - in the book.

"I don't want his name in my book and I don't want him in my life," he said.

"We had 27 seconds together (the length of the attack), I don't want to give him any more of my time."

Australian Associated Press