Writer Salman Rushdie can no longer see with one eye and use one hand as a result of the attack on him in New York more than two months ago. That’s what his literary agent Andrew Wylie says in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País. Wylie does not want to say whether Rushdie is still in the hospital. “But he’ll survive, that’s the main thing.”

The 75-year-old British-Indian author of The Devil’s Verses was severely beaten with a knife during a lecture in August. He had been threatened by Islam for more than three decades because of this work, and the former Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against him, inspiring the 24-year-old assailant to launch his attack.

Literary agent Wylie has now given the Spanish newspaper more details about the attack. Rushdie said he had three serious injuries to his neck and was unable to use one hand because nerves in his arm were severed. Rushdie also had about 15 wounds on his torso.

“Like the murder of John Lennon”

According to Wylie, Rushdie and his agent have discussed the risk of an attack during their years of working together. “The biggest threat he faced all those years after the fatwa came from a random person who would attack him out of nowhere. You cannot protect yourself from this because it is completely unexpected and illogical. It was like killing John Lennon.”

Although the fatwa against Rushdie was never withdrawn, he said a few weeks before the attack that the threat of an attack on him seemed manageable. In an interview with the German magazine “Stern”, he said that his life felt “completely normal” again and that the fear of an attack was actually a thing of the past. He counted himself lucky that the smear campaign The Devil’s Verses played before there was social media. According to him, the situation would have been “more dangerous, infinitely more dangerous.”

Like Salman Rushdie, Andrew Wylie is a big name in the literary world. As an agent, he manages the copyrights of contemporary great writers such as Milan Kundera and Orhan Pamuk, as well as the works of great names of the past such as Susan Sontag, William Shakespeare and Albert Camus. In honor of the Frankfurt Book Fair, he spoke to the Spanish newspaper about Rushdie, among other things.