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Salman Rushdie, the author whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was attacked Friday morning as he delivered a lecture at Chautauqua Institution in western New York.
A man stormed the Amphitheater stage and stabbed 75-year-old Rushdie in the neck as he was being introduced, according to New York State Police. Rushdie fell to the floor, and the man was taken into custody.
The lecture’s moderator was also attacked and suffered a minor head injury, police said.
Hundreds of people were evacuated as Rushdie was quickly surrounded by a small group of people who held up his legs, according to an Associated Press reporter.
Rushdie was taken by helicopter to a hospital. His agent, Andrew Wylie, said later Friday that the writer was on a ventilator, with a damaged liver, severed nerves in an arm and an eye he was likely to lose.
Police arrested the attacker and identified him as 24-year-old Hadi Matar of Fairview, N.J. His lawyer declined to comment.
In a tweet, the Institution said all programs were canceled for the remainder of the day.
“We ask for your prayers for Salman Rushdie and Henry Reese, and patience as we fully focus on coordinating with police officials following a tragic incident at the Amphitheater today,” the tweet said.
Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses has been banned in Iran since 1988 after Iran’s late leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, claimed it was blasphemous. A year later, Khomeini issued a fatwa, or a legal decree handed down by an Islamic religious leader, calling for Rushdie’s death — attached to a reward that has since increased to $3.3 million, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Rushdie was invited to speak on the Institution’s Week Seven summer lecture series theme “More than Shelter” alongside Henry Reese — co-founder of the Pittsburgh nonprofit City of Asylum — for a “discussion of the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression,” according to the Institution’s website.
In addition to being a bestselling, award-winning author, Rushdie is a former president of PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to defending free expression through literature and human rights advocacy.
In a statement, CEO Suzanne Nossel said PEN America is “reeling from shock and horror.”
“We can think of no comparable incident of a public attack on a literary writer on American soil,” Nossel wrote. “We hope and believe fervently that his essential voice cannot and will not be silenced.”
Rushdie came to Dallas in 2019 to promote his book, Quichotte: A Novel, as the inaugural speaker for the season of Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art.
In terms of his “pretty horrible” past, Rushdie told The Dallas Morning News, “one of the things I discovered about myself, which I would not have believed about myself, is that I somehow was able to deal with it, to get through it and come out the other end — and not be crazy.”