Atlanta ? Novelist Salman Rushdie plans to write a book about his decade in hiding under a death threat from the Iranian government using a digital archive of his personal papers housed at Emory University, he said Tuesday.

Rushdie, who is in the middle of a five-year stint as a distinguished lecturer at the Atlanta university, has donated his literary archive to Emory’s special collections library.

The university created an exhibit from the manuscripts, letters and photographs that opens Friday and runs through September.

“It’s my story, and at some point, it needs to be told,” he said during a news conference before touring the exhibit with reporters.

He donated the collection to Emory in 2006, but it’s been closed to the public since then so that it could be catalogued and transferred into a digital format. Now the archive is open for review by scholars, students and others interested Rushdie’s work.

Rushdie, 62, was forced into hiding in England for a decade because the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a 1989 fatwa, or religious edict, ordering Muslims to kill the author, saying his book, “The Satanic Verses,” insulted Islam. The Iranian government declared in 1998 that it would not support the fatwa but could not rescind it.

Still, some hardline Muslim groups have protested Rushdie in recent years and threatened to boycott organizations associated with him. Rushdie has said the fatwa is more “a piece of rhetoric than a real threat” now.