After being attacked on stage at a literary event in western New York in August, Salman Rushdie lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand, according to his agent’s statement on Saturday.
In an interview with the Spanish daily El Pais, Andrew Wylie, who represents literary greats including Saul Bellow and Roberto Bolano, highlighted the severity of the injuries Rushdie sustained in the assault. Wylie noticed the author’s loss of vision in one eye and referred to the author’s injuries as “deep.” He has three significant injuries to his neck. His arm’s nerves were cut, so he could only use one hand. In addition, his body and chest had another 15 or more wounds.
Just before Rushdie was to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, a retreat outside of New York, a 24-year-old New Jersey man is accused of stabbing the 75-year-old author of The Satanic Verses in the neck and body. The agent declined to comment on whether Rushdie was still hospitalized more than two months later.
WATCH: Controversial author Salman Rushdie Stabbed in the Neck on Stage in New York
The novelist, according to Wylie at the time, was transported to the hospital after sustaining significant wounds from the attack, including liver problems, nerve damage in his arm, and the likely loss of an eye. The assassination occurred 33 years to the day after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran at the time, issued a fatwa urging Muslims to kill Rushdie shortly after The Satanic Verses was released.
Salman Rushdie, who lived with a bounty on his head and spent nine years hiding out under the protection of the British police, was born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri family. The fatwa was never lifted even after Iran’s pro-reform administration under former president Mohammad Khatami disassociated itself from it in the late 1990s, while Rushdie’s multimillion-dollar bounty continued to rise. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor, was banned from Twitter in 2019 for declaring that the fatwa against Rushdie was “irrevocable.” To charges of assault and second-degree attempted murder, the suspect in the assault on the novelist has entered a not-guilty plea. He is detained in a jail in western New York without bail.
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