London, May 10 (ANI): Sir Salman Rushdie has confessed how the infamous Iranian fatwa helped him become a stronger and better person.

In 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued the author with a death warrant over alleged blasphemy against the Prophet Mohamed in his novel The Satanic Verses.

He returned to public life only 10 years later when Teheran withdrew its support for the death sentence.

In a recent interview with clinical psychologist Pamela Connolly, to be shown on Channel 4 later this month, the Booker-prize winning author revealed that the decision ultimately helped him become more self-aware.

He recalled how he reached rock bottom when the fatwa was declared and says that it "erased" his personality.

However, he added: "The thing about hitting the bottom is then you know where the bottom is...And after that, it cleared things up in my head... One of the things it cleared up was an urge in my mind, which is that everybody should like me."

"That was the moment at which I stopped being the prisoner of that thing, because I thought, OK, there are people who are not going to like me and do you know what, I don't like them."

The author also recollected his loneliness when he was sent from India to attend public school in Britain. He revealed how he suffered during his time at Rugby public school.

"Very quickly I began to understand that I was going to be treated as somebody who was different and some of that was almost comical," he said.

"I was clever, and I was foreign, and I was bad at games, and these are the three mistakes at an English boarding school," he added. (ANI)