DAYTON, Ohio – DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — Salman Rushdie was among the honorees Sunday at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize event in Ohio, receiving a lifetime achievement award after publishing his first work of fiction since he was stabbed on stage at a lecture in New York three years ago.
The awards recognize both literary merit and the contribution writers have made to the world through their work, with separate awards given annually for fiction, non-fiction and lifetime achievement. The Ohio city was the site of negotiations that led to the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, ending a war in the Balkans marked by ethnic cleansing that killed more than 300,000 people and displaced 1 million residents.
Rushdie, 78, is best known for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which includes a dream sequence about Prophet Muhammad which led to accusations of blasphemy and Iran's conscription in 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for the death of a writer of Indian origin, which forced him into hiding. He was blinded in one eye in a 2022 attack in front of a stunned audience, and his attacker, who was not yet born when The Satanic Verses was published, was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Accepting the award, Rushdie said it can be difficult to write about peace while living in times of “inexcusable violence”, including conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan.
“A book cannot stop a bullet. A poem cannot intercept a bomb,” he said.
But through literature, he said, writers can express solidarity with those who are suffering and with others on the front lines in conflict zones, such as journalists.
“We can amplify their voices by adding our voices to theirs,” Rushdie said. “It can show us the reality of another. It can show us what life looks like, not from our point of view, but from another point of view.”
Authorities said Rushdie's assailant, Hadi Matar, then 24 and a U.S. citizen, was trying to comply with a decades-old edict calling for his death when he drove from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target the writer in the summer resort of Chautauqua, New York, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.
Rushdie published an acclaimed memoir about the attack. “Knife,” a 2024 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction. His latest work, the 23rd, is “Eleventh Hour” which included three stories and two short stories.
Other recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award include former US President Jimmy Carter, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, feminist icon Gloria Steinem and writers Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Barbara Kingsolver and Studs Terkel. The Lifetime Achievement Award, also known as the Ambassador Richard K. Holbrooke Award for Excellence, is named after the American diplomat who was the architect of the Dayton Peace Accords.
Other winners this year include Kaveh Akbar for Martyr! about a poet and son of Iranian immigrants dealing with a mysterious family past, and Sunil Amrit for The Burning Earth, a story of how the global environment was shaped by empires, wars and humanity's increasing freedom of movement.
