Salman Rushdie was on a ventilator with a damaged liver and may lose one of his eyes after the India-born controversial author was stabbed in the neck and abdomen by a man on stage at a literary event in upstate New York.
Rushdie was stabbed by a 24-year-old New Jersey resident identified as Hadi Matar on stage on Friday while he was being introduced at the event of the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York.
A bloodied Rushdie was airlifted from a field adjacent to the venue to a hospital in north-western Pennsylvania where the 75-year-old writer underwent surgery.
Rushdie “will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged,” the writer’s agent Andrew Wylie told The New York Times.
“The news is not good,” Wylie said.