NEW YORK (AP) – Salman Rushdie is this year’s recipient of the Mailer Prize for lifetime achievement.
The author of “Midnight’s Children,” ”The Satanic Verses” and other novels was presented his award by Laurie Anderson at a ceremony Thursday night at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the New York City borough where Norman Mailer was raised and lived off and on until his death in 2007.
“It’s kind of great to be standing here in Norman Mailer’s shadow,” Rushdie said.
Rushdie, like Mailer, is a former president of the American chapter of PEN, the literary and human rights organization. He said Mailer had inspired him to help found the PEN World Voices Festival, an annual gathering of writers from around the world.
The 68-year-old Rushdie first encountered Mailer in the mid-1980s, when Mailer organized a famously contentious PEN congress. Rushdie said he remembered “how badly everybody behaved” and “how wonderful it was to see writers in the raw.”