Salman Rushdie is on the ‘road to recovery’ after emergency surgery, his agent has confirmed. The 75-year-old was airlifted to hospital after being stabbed on stage at a Chautauqua event in New York state on Friday. Despite injuries to his arm and abdomen, Andrew Wylie said the author is now recovering, although his injuries remain “serious”. Mr Wylie said: “He is off the ventilator so the road to recovery is on. “It will be a long time coming; the injuries are serious, but his condition is moving in the right direction.” British-American author Aatish Taseer previously said in a since-deleted tweet that the 75-year-old was “off the ventilator and talking (and joking)”, which the author’s agent Andrew Wylie later confirmed.
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Mr Wylie warned, however, that Sir Salman faces losing one of his eyes after being repeatedly stabbed. In a statement, Sir Salman’s son Zafar said his father remained in a “critical condition” but that his “provocative sense of humor remains intact”. The man accused of stabbing him pleaded not guilty Saturday to charges of attempted murder and assault, in what prosecutors called a “premeditated” crime. A lawyer for Hadi Matar, 24, entered the plea on his behalf during a formal hearing in a court in western New York. Matar appeared in court wearing a black and white jumpsuit and a white face mask, with his hands cuffed in front of him. Hadi Matar listens in court (Gene J. Puskar/AP) / AP A judge ordered her held without bail after prosecutor Jason Schmidt told her that Matar took steps to deliberately put himself in a position to harm Sir Salman by getting an advance pass to the event where the author was speaking and arriving a day early with a fake ID. “This was a targeted, unprovoked, premeditated attack on Mr. Rushdie,” Mr. Schmidt said. Public defender Nathaniel Barone said authorities took too long to bring Matar before a judge, leaving him “glued to a bench in the state police barracks.” “He has that constitutional right of presumption of innocence,” Mr. Barone added. Sir Salman was stabbed at least once in the neck and once in the abdomen, police said, before being taken to hospital. Sir Salman’s publisher Penguin Random House said they were “deeply shocked and appalled” by the incident. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was “appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed while exercising a right we must never stop defending”. He added: “My thoughts are with his loved ones at this time. We hope everyone is well.” Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “Salman Rushdie has long embodied the struggle for freedom and liberty against those who seek to destroy them. “This cowardly attack on yesterday is an attack on these values. The whole Labor Party is praying for his full recovery.” Bloodstains mark a screen on the stage where author Salman Rushdie was during a knife attack during a lecture in New York (Joshua Goodman/AP) / AP Sir Salman began his writing career in the early 1970s with two unsuccessful books before Midnight’s Children, about the birth of India, which won the Booker Prize in 1981. The author lived in hiding for many years in London under a British government protection program after the fatwa. In 1998, the Iranian government withdrew its support for the death penalty and Sir Salman gradually returned to public life, even appearing as himself in the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary. The Index on Censorship, an organization that promotes free expression, said money was raised to boost the reward for Sir Salman’s killing as recently as 2016, underscoring that the fatwa still stands. He was knighted in 2008 and earlier this year was made a Companion of the Honor as part of the Queen’s birthday honours.
