Salman Rushdie is being honored with a Dayton peace prize lifetime achievement award

DAYTON, Ohio -- DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — Salman Rushdie was among the honorees Sunday astatine the Dayton Literary Peace Prize lawsuit successful Ohio, receiving a beingness accomplishment grant aft publishing his archetypal enactment of fabrication since being stabbed connected a New York lecture signifier 3 years ago.

The prizes grant some literate merit and the writers' promotion of bid done their work, with abstracted awards annually for fiction, nonfiction and beingness achievement. The Ohio metropolis was the tract of negotiations that led to the Dayton Peace Accords successful 1995, ending a warfare successful the Balkans marked by taste cleansing that killed much than 300,000 people, arsenic good arsenic the displacement of 1 cardinal residents.

The 78-year-old Rushdie is champion known for his 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which includes a imagination series astir the Prophet Muhammad that prompted allegations of blasphemy and a 1989 telephone from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for the Indian-born writer's death, driving him into hiding. He was blinded successful 1 oculus from the 2022 onslaught earlier a stunned audience, and his assailant — who wasn't calved erstwhile “The Satanic Verses” was published — was sentenced to 25 years successful prison.

In accepting his award, Rushdie said it tin beryllium hard to constitute astir bid portion surviving successful a clip of “inexcusable violence,” including the conflicts successful Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan.

“A publication cannot halt a bullet. A poem cannot intercept a bomb," helium said.

But done literature, helium said, writers tin explicit solidarity with those who are suffering and others connected the beforehand lines of struggle zones, specified arsenic journalists.

“We tin enlarge their voices by adding our voices to their voices,” Rushdie said. “It tin amusement america the world of the other. It tin amusement america what beingness looks like, not from our constituent of view, but from different constituent of view.”

Authorities said Rushdie's attacker, Hadi Matar, past 24 and a U.S. citizen, was attempting to transportation retired the decades-old edict calling for his decease erstwhile helium traveled from his location successful Fairview, New Jersey, to people the writer astatine the summertime retreat of Chautauqua, New York, astir 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.

Rushdie published an acclaimed memoir astir the attack, “Knife,” successful 2024, a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His astir caller work, his 23rd, is “The Eleventh Hour,” which includes 3 novellas and 2 abbreviated stories.

Other past recipients of the beingness accomplishment grant see erstwhile U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Holocaust subsister and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, feminist question icon Gloria Steinem and writers Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Barbara Kingsolver, and Studs Terkel. The beingness accomplishment award, besides known arsenic the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, is named for the American diplomat who was an designer of the Dayton Peace Accords.

Other honorees this twelvemonth see Kaveh Akbar for his novel, “Martyr!" astir a writer and lad of Iranian immigrants dealing with a mysterious household past, and Sunil Amrith, for “The Burning Earth,” a past of however the planetary situation has been shaped by empires, wars and humanity's expanding state of movement.