SALMAN RUSHDIE ROAD TO RECOVERY

AS THE AUTHOR HEALS FROM A SHOCK STABBING ATTACK, WHO LOOKS INTO WHY HE WAS TARGETED

- Michael Crooks

The celebrated writer was in a lecture theatre on August 12 to discuss how America had become a haven for controversial authors. But within seconds of novelist Salman Rushdie taking his seat alongside academic Henry Reese on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution’s Amphitheatre in New York state, a man wielding a knife stormed toward him. The author rose and tried to evade the man, who was dressed in black and had his head wrapped in cloth like a ninja, but he was unable to avoid all of the blows. “The knife is unrelenting, arm raising and falling over and over and over,” wrote witness Lydia Strohl, a journalist who was covering the lecture series event for CNN. “After what seems like ages … the attacker is taken down by a few men and a state trooper. Rushdie and Reese have both fallen. Blood pools on the stage.”

The blood belonged to Rushdie, and his injuries were shocking. The Indian-born British-American author, whose 1988 book,