Salman Rushdie Awarded 2023 Hay Festival Medal for Prose for His Novel ‘Victory City’
- Accepting the British award remotely, the author told the festival that he is writing a book about being stabbed on stage in New York last year.
Author Salman Rushdie was awarded this year’s Hay festival medal for prose for his latest novel “Victory City.” The Hay Festival, set in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, is one of the world’s most prominent literary events, attracting renowned authors, thinkers, and readers from all corners of the globe.
Awarded annually since 2012, the other 2023 recipients are Mererid Hopwood (Medal for Poetry), Alice Oseman (Medal for Fiction), and Serhiy Zhadan (Medal for Songwriting). Rushdie, who is still recovering from last year’s stabbing, accepted the award remotely.
In a panel discussion on the novel, Margaret Atwood said the book “read like a fairytale – and then less like a fairytale and more like the Wars of the Roses,” The Guardian reported. Similarly, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak described the novel as a “blend of the harshest politics and reality with immense imagination.”
In a pre-recorded Zoom appearance, Rushdie told the festival that he is writing a book about being stabbed on stage in New York last year, an attack which left him without sight in one eye, The Guardian reported. “I’m trying to write a book about the attack on me – what happened and what it means, not just about the attack, but around it,” he said.
Rushdie, who has participated in Hay Festival conversations for decades, said, “It will be a relatively short book, a couple of hundred pages. It’s not the easiest book in the world to write but it’s something I need to get past in order to do anything else. I can’t really start writing a novel that’s got nothing to do with this … So I just have to deal with it.”
Like the Jaipur Literary Festival in India, the week-long Hay Festival fosters intellectual exchange among writers, intellectuals, and audiences and a diverse range of topics is explored through lectures, panel discussions, book signings, and workshops. From fiction and poetry to science, philosophy, and politics, the festival caters to an array of interests, appealing to a broad spectrum of attendees.