Contacted by AFP, police in Chautauqua County, where the writer was to speak, confirmed that a person had been "stabbed" without specifying at this stage the identity of the victim.
"The most terrible event has just happened at the Chautauqua Institution - Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage. The amphitheater is evacuated", wrote a witness on social networks
No other information was available.
Video images posted on social networks show spectators in a theater rushing on stage to help someone seen on the ground.
Salman Rushdie, born in 1947 in Bombay, India, two months before his independence from the British Empire, tries not to be reduced to the scandal caused by the publication of the "Satanic Verses", which had set the Muslim world ablaze and led in 1989 to a "fatwa" calling for his assassination.
"My problem is that people continue to perceive me under the unique prism of the + fatwa +", said a few years ago this free-thinker who wants to be a writer, not a symbol.
But current events - the rise to power of radical Islam - have constantly brought it back to what it has always been in the eyes of the West: the symbol of the fight against religious obscurantism and for freedom of expression.
Already in 2005, he considered that this "fatwa" had constituted a prelude to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Forced from then on to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache, he called himself Joseph Anton, in homage to his favorite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
He has to face immense loneliness, further increased by the break with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, to whom "Les verses..." is dedicated.
Settled in New York for a few years, Salman Rushdie - arched eyebrows, heavy eyelids, bald head, glasses and beard - had resumed an almost normal life while continuing to defend, in his books, satire and irreverence.
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© 2022 AFP