The novelist Salman Rushdie has been stabbed in the neck on stage at an event in western New York. The New York State Police have confirmed that a male suspect has been taken into custody. Rushdie, 75, remains in hospital. His literary agent Andrew Wylie said in a statement on Friday evening that Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to speak. “The news is not good. Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”
The event that Rushdie was due to speak at was set to feature a “discussion of the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression”.
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