LONDON (AP) — Writer Salman Rushdie has made a public speech, 9 months after being stabbed and severely injured onstage, warning that freedom of expression within the West is below its most extreme risk in his lifetime.
Rushdie delivered a video message to the British Book Awards, the place he was awarded the Freedom to Publish award on Monday night. Organizers stated the honour “acknowledges the determination of authors, publishers and booksellers who take a stand against intolerance, despite the ongoing threats they face.”
He stated 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 U.S., 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, 75, was blinded in a single eye and suffered nerve injury to his hand when he was attacked at a literary pageant in New York state in August. His alleged assailant, Hadi Matar, has pleaded not responsible to costs of assault and tried homicide.
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.”
In his speech, Rushdie additionally criticized publishers who change decades-old books for contemporary sensibilities, resembling 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 enable 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.
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