Author Salman Rushdie lost sight in one eye and was left “disabled” in one hand after being stabbed to death in the United States in August, his agent said in an interview published this weekend.

The 75-year-old writer, who received multiple death threats after publishing his The Satanic Verses, was stabbed multiple times in the neck and abdomen before he was due to give a lecture in upstate New York.

Rushdie was then flown to a nearby hospital for emergency surgery, but his condition had improved in the weeks that followed.

“He lost his eyesight… He had three serious wounds in his neck. One hand is disabled because the nerves in his arm have been severed. And he’s got about 15 other wounds on his chest and torso,” Andrew Wylie told Spanish daily El Pais about Rushdie’s health.

The injuries “were profound … it was a brutal attack,” Wylie added.

He did not want to say anything about the whereabouts of the writer or whether he was still in the hospital, but said: “He will live.”

The British author had been in hiding for years after Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered his assassination over what he believed to be the blasphemous nature of The Satanic Verses.

The prime suspect, Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old New Jersey man of Lebanese descent, was arrested immediately after the Rushdie attack and pleaded not guilty at a New York state hearing in mid-August.

The attack sparked outrage in the West but was praised by extremists in Muslim countries like Iran and Pakistan.