Author Salman Rushdie has been awarded the first-ever ‘Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award’ by the Vaclav Havel Center on November 14.
- He accepted it from Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. This was Rushdie’s first public appearance since he was stabbed during a literary festival in New York in August 2022.
- Rushdie has written more than a dozen novels, including The Satanic Verses in 1988.
- That novel was banned in Iran as blasphemous, and a fatwa calling for his death was issued by the country’s then supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.
- Meanwhile, the ‘Disturbing the Peace Award to a Courageous Writer at Risk’ was conferred upon Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah.
