Salman Rushdie warns free expression ‘under threat’ rare address after attack

Organisers stated the honour “acknowledges the determination of authors, publishers and booksellers who take a stand against intolerance, despite the ongoing threats they face”.

Rushdie, 75, seemed thinner than earlier than the assault and wore glasses with one tinted lens. He was blinded in his proper eye and suffered nerve injury to his hand when he was attacked at a literary pageant in New York state in August.

He advised the awards ceremony that “we live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression, freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West”.

“Now I am sitting here in the US, I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools,” he stated.

“The attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It is quite remarkably alarming, and we need to be very aware of it, and to fight against it very hard.”

Rushdie spent years in hiding with police safety after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, in 1989 calling for his demise over the alleged blasphemy of the novel The Satanic Verses.

He progressively returned to public life after the Iranian authorities distanced itself from the order in 1998, saying it might not again any effort to kill Rushdie, although the fatwa was by no means formally repealed.

Rushdie received the Booker Prize in 1981 for his novel Midnight’s Children, and in 2008 was voted the all time winner of the distinguished fiction prize.

His most up-to-date novel, Victory City — accomplished a month earlier than the assault — was revealed in February.

In his speech, Rushdie additionally criticized publishers who change decades-old books for contemporary sensibilities, corresponding to large-scale cuts and rewrites to the works of youngsters’s writer Roald Dahl and James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

He stated publishers ought to permit books “to come to us from their time and be of their time”.

“And if that’s difficult to take, don’t read it, read another book,” he stated.