DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — Salman Rushdie was among the many honorees Sunday on the Dayton Literary Peace Prize occasion in Ohio, receiving a lifetime achievement award after publishing his first work of fiction since being stabbed on a New York lecture stage three years in the past.
The prizes honor each literary advantage and the writers’ promotion of peace by means of their work, with separate awards yearly for fiction, nonfiction and lifelong achievement. The Ohio metropolis was the positioning of negotiations that led to the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, ending a warfare within the Balkans marked by ethnic cleaning that killed greater than 300,000 individuals, in addition to the displacement of 1 million residents.
The 78-year-old Rushdie is finest recognized for his 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which features a dream sequence concerning the Prophet Muhammad that prompted allegations of blasphemy and a 1989 name from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for the Indian-born author’s demise, driving him into hiding. He was blinded in a single eye from the 2022 assault earlier than a surprised viewers, and his assailant — who wasn’t born when “The Satanic Verses” was printed — was sentenced to 25 years in jail.
Authorities mentioned his attacker, Hadi Matar, then 24 and a U.S. citizen, was trying to hold out the decades-old edict calling for Rushdie’s demise when he traveled from his residence in Fairview, New Jersey, to focus on Rushdie on the summer season retreat of Chautauqua, New York, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.
Rushdie printed an acclaimed memoir concerning the assault, “Knife,” in 2024, a finalist for the Nationwide E-book Award for Nonfiction. His most up-to-date work, his twenty third, is “The Eleventh Hour,” which incorporates three novellas and two quick tales.
Different previous recipients of the lifetime achievement award embody former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, feminist motion icon Gloria Steinem and writers Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Barbara Kingsolver, and Studs Terkel. The lifetime achievement award, also referred to as the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, is known as for the American diplomat who was an architect of the Dayton Peace Accords.
Different honorees this yr embody Kaveh Akbar for his novel, “Martyr!” about a poet and son of Iranian immigrants dealing with a mysterious family past, and Sunil Amrith, for “The Burning Earth,” a historical past of how the worldwide surroundings has been formed by empires, wars and humanity’s rising freedom of motion.
