Salman Rushdie receives lifetime achievement Dayton peace prize award in Ohio

Salman Rushdie has received a lifetime achievement award at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize event after publishing his first work of fiction since being stabbed on a New York stage three years ago.

The Ohio event honours both literary merit and the writers’ promotion of peace through their work, with separate awards annually for fiction, nonfiction and lifetime achievement.

The 78-year-old Rushdie is best known for his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, which includes a dream sequence about the Prophet Mohammed that prompted allegations of blasphemy and a 1989 call from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for the writer’s death, driving him into hiding.

He was blinded in one eye from the 2022 attack before a stunned audience, and his assailant - who wasn’t born when The Satanic Verses was published - was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

In accepting his award, Rushdie said it can be difficult to write about peace while living in a time of “inexcusable violence,” including the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan.

“A book cannot stop a bullet. A poem cannot intercept a bomb,” he said.

But through literature, Rushdie said, writers can express solidarity with those who are suffering and others on the front lines of conflict zones, such as journalists.

“We can enlarge their voices by adding our voices to their voices,” he said. “It can show us the reality of the other. It can show us what life looks like, not from our point of view, but from another point of view.”

Rushdie published an acclaimed memoir about the New York attack, Knife, in 2024, a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His most recent work, his 23rd, is The Eleventh Hour, which includes three novellas and two short stories.