Salman Rushdie suffered a cancer scare shortly after he survived a brutal stabbing

In his new book 'Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder', Rushdie wrote: "I was at a loss for words. Really? After I narrowly survived a murder attempt, now I had to face the prospect of cancer? This was unacceptable. It was unfair."

He was referred for an MRI scan which revealed the "small bump" was "likely to be cancer". Rushdie added: "On the 1-to-5 scale of probability they used, I had scored a wretched 4."

He went on to have a prostate cancer PSA blood test and another MRI scan before doctors determined the lump was not cancerous and was likely to have been caused by a urinary tract infection.

Rushie concluded: "The second MRI took place in December, five weeks after Dr U-2's inspection, two months after the message reading cancer likely. This time the scan was clear.

"On the scale of 1 to 5, I was now a proud 1. There was no lump. I didn't have prostate cancer. The universe wasn't quite as cruel as that, even though it had waited two long months to tell me so."

The revelation comes after the novelist admitted he predicted he would be stabbed to death in a chilling dream just two days before he was attacked at the Chautauqua Institution - and he almost cancelled the event.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS programme '60 Minutes', Salman explained: "[The dream] was just somebody with a spear stabbing downwards, and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him ... I was quite shaken by it and I said to [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'.

"And then you wake up a bit more, and you think, it's just a dream, and you're not going to allow your life to be ruled by something that happened in a dream. "And so I thought, I'll go. It's a gig."