New York — The newest honor for Salman Rushdie was a prize stored secret till minutes earlier than he rose from his seat to simply accept it. On Tuesday night time, the writer obtained the first-ever Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award, introduced by the Vaclav Havel Middle on Manhattan’s Higher East Facet. Solely a handful of the greater than 100 attendees had advance discover about Rushdie, whose whereabouts have largely been withheld from most people since he was stabbed repeatedly in August of 2022 throughout a literary competition in Western New York.
“I apologize for being a thriller visitor,” Rushdie stated Tuesday night time after being launched by “Studying Lolita in Tehran” writer Azar Nafisi. “I do not really feel in any respect mysterious. But it surely made life slightly easier.”
The Havel heart, based in 2012 because the Vaclav Havel Library Basis, is known as for the Czech playwright and dissident who turned the final president of Czechoslovakia after the autumn of the Communist regime within the late Eighties. The middle has a mission to advance the legacy of Havel, who died in 2011 and was recognized for championing human rights and free expression. Quite a few writers and diplomats attended Tuesday’s ceremony, hosted by longtime CBS Information journalist Lesley Stahl.
Alaa Abdel-Fattah, the imprisoned Egyptian activist, was given the Disturbing the Peace Award to a Brave Author at Threat. His aunt, the acclaimed writer and translator Adhaf Soueif, accepted on his behalf and stated he was conscious of the prize.
“He is very grateful,” she stated. “He was notably happy by the title of the award, ‘Disturbing the Peace.’ This actually tickled him.”
Abdel-Fattah, who turns 42 later this week, turned recognized internationally in the course of the 2011 pro-democracy uprisings within the Center East that drove out Egypt’s longtime President Hosni Mubarak. He has since been imprisoned a number of occasions beneath the presidency of Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, making him an emblem for most of the nation’s continued autocratic rule.
Rushdie, 76, famous that final month he had obtained the Peace Prize of the German E-book Commerce, and now was getting a prize for disturbing the peace, leaving him questioning which facet of “the fence” he was on.
He spent a lot of his speech praising Havel, an in depth pal whom he remembered as being among the many first authorities leaders to defend him after the novelist was pushed into hiding by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 decree calling for his loss of life over the alleged blasphemy of “The Satanic Verses.”
Rushdie stated Havel was “form of a hero of mine” who was “in a position to be an artist similtaneously being an activist.”
“He was inspirational to me as for a lot of, many writers, and to obtain an award in his title is a good honor,” Rushdie added.