Credit: X (formerly Twitter) Salman Rushdie

The Indian-born British-American author Salman Rushdie lost the sight in his right eye, sustained serious wounds to his neck, face and abdomen and was left with his hand temporarily incapacitated after a stabbing at a 2022 literary event in Chautauqua, New York. Speaking to the media for the first time since the attack, the 76-year-old told The New Yorker he felt lucky. “What I really want to say is that my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude.”

After a long recovery, Rushdie said he is “not so bad” considering the severity of the incident. “The big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm,” he said.

Over the years, Rushdie has been the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, especially after the publishing of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), for which Ruhollah Khomeini, the former supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for the author’s death.