Salman Rushdie warns against US censorship in rare public address

Author speaks on 'extraordinary attack on libraries' in web address during British Book Awards

Salman Rushdie attends a ceremony in New York in 2017. AP

British-Indian author Salman Rushdie made a rare public appearance in which he warned about censorship in the US, nine months after he was stabbed onstage during a speaking event in upstate New York.

Rushdie was awarded the Freedom to Publish, which acknowledges authors and publishers who stand against intolerance despite threats they face.

In a video message presented at the British Book Awards on Monday evening, Rushdie said “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 said.

“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.”

Book bans in schools are on the rise in the US, according to a report from Pen America, an organisation that promotes free speech.

Pen America reported that nearly 1,500 books were banned during the first half of the 2022-23 school year, a 28 per cent increase compared to the previous six months. Bans are most prevalent in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina, the report found.

A poll commissioned by the American Library Association last year showed that 71 per cent of US voters opposed books being removed from their public libraries.

In his speech, Rushdie also criticised publishers who made significant rewrites to works written by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming.

Rushdie spent years in hiding after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him in 1989 over his novel The Satanic Verses.

The author was stabbed repeatedly last year at a speaking event at the Chautauqua Institution, which left him with loss of sight in one eye and other serious injuries. In an interview with The New Yorker earlier this year, Rushdie said he was struggling to write because the attack left him “incapacitated” in one hand, and because he was struggling with a mental block.

His latest novel, Victory City, which he finished a month before the August 2022 attack, was released in February.

The Associated Press contributed to this report