3 min readJul 9, 2026 08:17 PM IST
Indian-born British-American author Salman Rushdie Wednesday accepted international diplomacy organisation Liberatum’s ‘Cultural Honour’ in London. The honour, which has previously been given to the likes of Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul, architect Zaha Hadid and filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, is annually awarded to a figure judged to have shaped world literature.
While the award itself is in its 14th year, this year’s ceremony doubled as the organisation’s 25th-anniversary celebration. Speaking to Reuters on the sidelines, The Satanic Verses author, who was stabbed in the eye at a public event in 2022 in response to a fatwa issued against him 33 years ago, said it was “a difficult time in many parts of the world” when it came to free speech and expression.
“I never thought that there would be such an assault on free speech coming from the authorities in the land of the First Amendment,” he told Reuters in a video interview, referring to the United States of America, the country that has been his home for at least 26 years. “When (US President Donald) Trump and (vice-president J D) Vance talk about free expression, they really only mean free expression for people who agree with them. The fact that they have been attacking journalists, comedians, writers, artists, intellectuals for expressing dissenting opinions shows what they think of free speech. So I don’t think I want to listen to them on that subject.”
Referring to book bans in schools across America, the Midnight’s Children author said, “There’s a lot of challenges to those, and in many cases the challenges are successful. So, it is not one-way traffic. But, it is definitely a battle that we did not expect to have to fight.”
According to the latest PEN America report, there have been 22,810 instances of school book bans across 45 US states between 2021 and 2025. These bans affected 3,752 unique titles, with non-fiction titles seeing a sharp surge of censorship.
India faced a parallel crisis, he said, adding that his friends in his “country of origin” are “extremely concerned” about the climate. “So I think it’s a moment when we have to gird our loins and as I say, fight a fight that I thought we’d won,” he told Reuters.
“Zero interest” in AI, biopic
In a separate interview with Variety, Rushdie dismissed the role of artificial intelligence in fiction. It can absorb enormous amounts of information, he said, and produce versions of what already exists. What it cannot do is what art requires: something nobody has done before. “I have less than zero interest in AI,” he told the outlet.
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While “Knife,” Alex Gibney’s documentary on the 2022 stage attack that blinded Rushdie in one eye, will premiere in the UK and US this September, Rushdie said a biopic was not in the future. “I didn’t become a writer in order to write about myself,” he told Variety.
