Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator, unable to speak, and may lose an eye.
The Indian-born novelist, who spent years in hiding after Iran urged Muslims to kill him because of his writing, was stabbed in the neck and torso onstage at a lecture in New York state and airlifted to hospital.
“The news is not good,” Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s agent, said.
“Salman will likely lose one eye, the nerves in his arm were severed and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”
Rushdie, 75, was being introduced to give a talk to an audience of hundreds on artistic freedom at western New York’s Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at the novelist, who has lived with a bounty on his head since the late 1980s.
Stunned attendees helped wrest the man from Rushdie, who had fallen to the floor.
Police identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey.
“A man jumped up on the stage … and started what looked like beating him on the chest, repeated fist strokes into his chest and neck,” Bradley Fisher, who was in the audience, said.
“People were screaming and crying out and gasping.”
Henry Reese, the event’s moderator, suffered a minor head injury during the incident.
Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, now known as Mumbai, before moving to the United Kingdom, has faced death threats for his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims said contained blasphemous passages.
The novel was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations upon its 1988 publication.
A few months later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy.
Rushdie, who called his novel “pretty mild”, went into hiding for many years. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was murdered in 1991.
The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer back the fatwa, and Rushdie has lived relatively openly in recent years, although Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said as recently as 2019 the fatwa remained “irrevocable”.
Iranian organisations, some affiliated with the government, have raised a bounty worth millions of dollars for Rushdie’s murder.
Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency and other news outlets donated money in 2016 to increase the bounty by $US600,000 ($A845,000).
Fars called Rushdie an apostate who “insulted the prophet” in his report on Friday’s attack.
Rushdie published a memoir in 2012 about his life under the fatwa called Joseph Anton, the pseudonym he used while under British police protection.
His second novel, Midnight’s Children, won the 1981 Booker Prize.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was appalled Rushdie was “stabbed while exercising a right we should never cease to defend”.
Rushdie was at the institution in western New York for a discussion about the United States giving asylum to writers and artists in exile and “as a home for freedom of creative expression”, according to the institution’s website.
There were no obvious security checks at the Chautauqua Institution, a landmark founded in the 19th century in the small lakeside town of the same name, with staff simply checking people’s tickets for admission, attendees said.
“I felt like we needed to have more protection there because Salman Rushdie is not a usual writer,” Anour Rahmani, an Algerian writer and activist who was in the audience, said.
“He’s a writer with a fatwa against him.”
Michael Hill, the institution’s president, said at a news conference, “Our whole purpose is to help people bridge what has been too divisive of a world.
“The worst thing Chautauqua could do is back away from its mission in light of this tragedy. I don’t think Mr. Rushdie would want that either.”
Rushdie became an American citizen in 2016 and lives in New York City.
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