Salman Rushdie has been honoured with a lifetime achievement award at theDayton Literary Peace Prize event in Ohio, a significant recognition coming after he published his first work of fiction since being brutally stabbed on a New York lecture stage three years ago.
The prestigious prizes celebrate both literary merit and writers’ commitment to promoting peace through their work.
The Ohio city itself holds historical significance, having hosted the negotiations that led to the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the devastating Ba…
Salman Rushdie has been honoured with a lifetime achievement award at theDayton Literary Peace Prize event in Ohio, a significant recognition coming after he published his first work of fiction since being brutally stabbed on a New York lecture stage three years ago.
The prestigious prizes celebrate both literary merit and writers’ commitment to promoting peace through their work.
The Ohio city itself holds historical significance, having hosted the negotiations that led to the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the devastating Balkan War, responsible for over 300,000 deaths and the displacement of a million people.
In 2022, Rushdie was attacked on stage and blinded in one eye before a stunned audience.
His assailant, Hadi Matar, then 24 and a US citizen, was later sentenced to 25 years in prison, having travelled from New Jersey to Chautauqua, New York, to carry out the decades-old edict.
Despite the ordeal, Rushdie has continued his prolific career, publishing the acclaimed memoir Knife in 2024, a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Rushdie (Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)
His 23rd work, The Eleventh Hour, a collection of novellas and short stories, was published earlier this month.
The 78-year-old author is renowned for his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, which sparked allegations of blasphemy due to a dream sequence involving the Prophet Muhammad.
This led to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a 1989 call for the Indian-born writer’s death, forcing him into hiding.
Other past recipients of the lifetime achievement award include former US president Jimmy Carter, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, feminist movement icon Gloria Steinem and writers Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Barbara Kingsolver, and Studs Terkel.
The lifetime achievement award, also known as the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, is named for the American diplomat who was an architect of the Dayton Peace Accords.
Other honorees this year include 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 history of how the global environment has been shaped by empires, wars and humanity’s increasing freedom of movement.