Salman Rushdie receives first-ever Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award

NEW YORK – The newest honor for Salman Rushdie used to be a prize stored secret till mins ahead of he rose from his seat to simply accept it.

On Tuesday evening, the creator gained the first-ever Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award, offered via the Vaclav Havel Center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Only a handful of the greater than 100 attendees had advance realize about Rushdie, whose whereabouts have in large part been withheld from the common public since he was stabbed repeatedly in August of 2022 throughout a literary pageant in Western New York.

“I apologize for being a mystery guest,” Rushdie mentioned Tuesday evening after being presented via “Reading Lolita in Tehran” creator Azar Nafisi. “I don’t feel at all mysterious. But it made life a little simpler.”

The Havel middle, based in 2012 as the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, is called for the Czech playwright and dissident who become the ultimate president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Communist regime in the past due Eighties. The middle has a venture to advance the legacy of Havel, who died in 2011 and used to be identified for championing human rights and loose expression. Numerous writers and diplomats attended Tuesday’s rite, hosted via longtime CBS journalist Lesley Stahl.

Alaa Abdel-Fattah, the imprisoned Egyptian activist, used to be given the Disturbing the Peace Award to a Courageous Writer at Risk. His aunt, the acclaimed creator and translator Adhaf Soueif, accredited on his behalf and mentioned he used to be conscious about the prize.

“He’s very grateful,” she mentioned. “He was particularly pleased by the name of the award, ‘Disturbing the Peace.’ This really tickled him.”

Abdel-Fattah, who turns 42 later this week, become identified the world over throughout the 2011 pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East that drove out Egypt’s longtime President Hosni Mubarak. He has since been imprisoned a number of occasions underneath the presidency of Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, making him an emblem for plenty of of the nation’s persisted autocratic rule.

Rushdie, 76, famous that ultimate month he had received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and now used to be getting a prize for stressful the peace, leaving him questioning which facet of “the fence” he used to be on.

He spent a lot of his speech praising Havel, an in depth pal whom he remembered as being amongst the first executive leaders to shield him after the novelist used to be pushed into hiding via Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 decree calling for his demise over the alleged blasphemy of “The Satanic Verses.”

Rushdie mentioned Havel used to be “kind of a hero of mine” who used to be “able to be an artist at the same time as being an activist.”

“He was inspirational to me as for many, many writers, and to receive an award in his name is a great honor,” Rushdie added.