Salman Rushdie is being honored with a Dayton peace prize lifetime achievement award

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — Salman Rushdie was among the honorees Sunday at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize event in Ohio, receiving a lifetime achievement award after publishing his first work of fiction since being stabbed on a New York lecture stage three years ago.

The prizes honor both literary merit and the writers’ promotion of peace through their work, with separate awards annually for fiction, nonfiction and lifetime achievement. The Ohio city was the site of negotiations that led to the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, ending a war in the Balkans marked by ethnic cleansing that killed more than 300,000 people, as well as the displacement of 1 million residents.

The 78-year-old Rushdie is best known for his 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which includes a dream sequence about the Prophet Muhammad that prompted allegations of blasphemy and a 1989 call from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for the Indian-born 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, he 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,” Rushdie 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.”

Authorities said Rushdie’s attacker, Hadi Matar, then 24 and a U.S. citizen, was attempting to carry out the decades-old edict calling for his death when he traveled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target the writer at the summer retreat of Chautauqua, New York, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.

Rushdie published an acclaimed memoir about the 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.

Other past recipients of the lifetime achievement award include former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, feminist movement icon Gloria Steinem and writers Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Barbara Kingsolver, and Studs Terkel. The lifetime achievement award, also known as the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, is named for the American diplomat who was an architect of the Dayton Peace Accords.

Other honorees this year include Kaveh Akbar for his novel, “Martyr!” about a poet and son of Iranian immigrants dealing with a mysterious family past, and Sunil Amrith, for “The Burning Earth,” a history of how the global environment has been shaped by empires, wars and humanity’s increasing freedom of movement.