Salman Rushdie Receives Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award
New York
The latest honor for Salman Rushdie was a prize kept secret until minutes before he rose from his seat to accept it. On Tuesday night, the author received the first-ever Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award, presented by the Vaclav Havel Center on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Only a handful of the more than 100 attendees had advance notice about Rushdie, whose whereabouts have largely been withheld from the general public since he was stabbed repeatedly in August of 2022 during a literary festival in Western New York.
"I apologize for being a mystery guest," Rushdie said Tuesday night after being introduced by "Reading Lolita in Tehran" author Azar Nafisi. "I don't feel at all mysterious. But it made life a little simpler."
The Havel center, founded in 2012 as the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, is named for the Czech playwright and dissident who became the last president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Communist regime in the late 1980s. The center has a mission to advance the legacy of Havel, who died in 2011 and was known for championing human rights and free expression. Numerous writers and diplomats attended Tuesday's ceremony, hosted by longtime CBS News journalist Lesley Stahl.
Alaa Abdel-Fattah, the imprisoned Egyptian activist, was honored with the Disturbing the Peace Award to a Courageous Writer at Risk. The award was accepted on his behalf by his aunt, the renowned author and translator Adhaf Soueif, who mentioned that Abdel-Fattah was aware of the prize.
"He's very grateful," she said. "He was particularly pleased by the name of the award, 'Disturbing the Peace.' This really tickled him."
Abdel-Fattah, who will turn 42 later this week, gained international recognition during the 2011 pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East that led to the removal of Egypt's long-serving President Hosni Mubarak. Since then, he has been imprisoned multiple times under the presidency of Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, becoming a symbol for many of the country's ongoing autocratic rule.
Rushdie, 76, mentioned that he recently received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and now he is being honored with a prize for disturbing the peace, leaving him pondering which side of "the fence" he is on.
In his speech, Rushdie praised Havel, a close friend who was one of the first government leaders to defend him when he went into hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 decree calling for his death over the alleged blasphemy of "The Satanic Verses."
Rushdie described Havel as "kind of a hero of mine" who was able to be both an artist and an activist.
"His influence on me, as well as countless other writers, was profound, and it is truly a privilege to be recognized with an award bearing his name," expressed Rushdie.
