Salman Rushdie, the Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children and The Devil’s Verses, will be awarded Liberatum’s 14th Cultural Honors at a ceremony to be held in London on July 8th.
The event also commemorates the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the International Organization for Cultural Diplomacy.
Founded in 2001, Liberatum positions the honor as both a tribute to Rushdie’s literary legacy and a public statement about freedom of expression. The night’s theme reflects the group’s view that freedom of expression is under greater threat in more places and in more ways than at any time in recent memory.
The ceremony comes months after Rushdie’s story reached a new audience through Alex Gibney’s Sundance documentary “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” which includes never-before-seen footage of Rushdie’s stabbing death by Hadi Matar at the Chautauqua complex in upstate New York in August 2022. The film is also based on a video diary recorded in Rushdie’s hospital room in the days after the attack by Rushdie’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. “People should see and experience what terrorism feels like,” Rushdie told Variety at Sundance.
Guests representing the world of film and television include director Richard Eyre, filmmaker Asif Kapadia, journalist and director Louis Theroux, and director Terry Gilliam. BAFTA-winning film director Amma Asante is also one of the participants.
The guest list further spans literature, media and general life. Biographer and historian Antonia Fraser will be in attendance, as will Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and one of the most influential voices in transatlantic media.
Participant programs bring together an interdisciplinary group of artists and thinkers. Bharti Kher, a contemporary Indian artist whose sculptures, installations and paintings explore themes of mythology and identity politics, will also be joining us on the evening. Also starring is Griffith, an acclaimed American poet, novelist and visual artist whose debut novel Promise in 2023 garnered widespread critical acclaim, and whose intimate footage of Rushdie’s recovery became the emotional core of Gibney’s film. British journalist and Independent editor-in-chief Geordie Greig and Indian film director Moses Singh have been confirmed to appear. Together they span visual art, poetry, film, fiction, and journalism. The Liberatum framework reminds us how many forms of expression are worth defending.
Previous recipients of Liberatum’s Cultural Honors Series include Zaha Hadid and Francis Ford Coppola, and Rushdie joins what the organization calls a lineage of individuals who have achieved the highest levels of artistic achievement and used their platforms to push the boundaries of human possibility.
Rushdie survived a near-fatal stabbing at Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York in August 2022. He continued to write and speak publicly, publishing Knife: Meditations After Attempted Murder in 2024. His latest work is The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories. Over a career spanning 23 books, his titles have been translated into over 40 languages.
The ceremony venue, Town Hall, is a reimagined cultural space housed in the Tom Dixon-designed former Camden Town Hall building, which spans more than 60,000 square feet in central London’s King’s Cross district.
