British author Salman Rushdie has been left unable to speak and on a ventilator after he was stabbed in the neck and torso onstage at a lecture in New York state on Friday evening.

Salman, 75, who spent years in hiding after Iran urged Muslims to kill him because of his novel The Satanic Verses, was airlifted to a hospital in Pennsylvania where he spent hours in surgery being treated for serious injuries. 

"The news is not good," Andrew Wylie, his book agent, wrote in an email. "Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged."

Salman was being introduced to give a talk to an audience of hundreds on artistic freedom at western New York's Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at the novelist 

Police identified the attacker as Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey. He was awaiting arraignment following his arrest at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat centre where Rushdie was scheduled to speak.