His agent said Salman Rushdie lost one eye and one hand after a stage attack at a literary event in western New York in August.
Andrew Wylie, who represents literary stalwarts such as Saul Bolo and Roberto Bolao, described the extent of the injuries Rushdie suffered in the “brutal” attack in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País.
Wylie described the author’s wounds as “profound” and noted the loss of vision in one eye. “He had three serious wounds to his neck. One arm is disabled because his arm nerves have been cut. He has about 15 more wounds to his chest and torso.”
The agent declined to say whether the 75-year-old author of “The Satanic Verses” had been in the hospital for more than two months after police said a 24-year-old from New Jersey had written the author just before giving it to Rushdie. was stabbed in the neck and torso. Lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, about 12 miles (19 km) from Lake Erie.
Wyllie said at the time that the novelist was taken to the hospital after suffering serious injuries in the attack, including nerve damage to his arm, wounds to his liver, and possible loss of an eye.
The attack comes 33 years after then Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa or religious order calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie, months after “The Satanic Verses” was published. Some Muslims saw passages about the Prophet Muhammad in the novel as blasphemy.
Rushdie, who was born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri family, lives with a bounty on his head, and has spent nine years in hiding under British police protection.
While Iran’s pro-reform government President Mohammad Khatami distanced himself from the fatwa in the late 1990s, the multimillion-dollar bounty on Rushdie’s head continued to grow and the fatwa was never lifted.
Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was suspended from Twitter in 2019 because the fatwa against Rushdie was “irreversible”.
The man accused of assaulting the novelist has pleaded not guilty to the charges of murder and second-degree attempted assault. He is being held in a prison in western New York without bail.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)