MAYVILLE, N.Y. — In 2022, Salman Rushdie was about to deliver a lecture before a live audience in western New York when a man ran towards him and plunged a knife into the author’s hand as he raised it in self-defence.

“After that there are many blows, to my neck, to my chest, to my eye, everywhere,” Rushdie recalled in a memoir that followed. “I feel my legs give way, and I fall.”