In Dayton, Ohio, a city steeped in the history of peace negotiations, Salman Rushdie was celebrated for his literary contributions at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize event. On Sunday, the renowned author was awarded a lifetime achievement honor, marking his first major recognition since surviving a brutal attack on a New York lecture stage three years prior. This award coincides with the release of his latest novel, his first work of fiction since that harrowing incident.

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is a unique accolade that applauds both the artistic merit of writers and their efforts to promote peace through literature. Each year, the prize distinguishes achievements in fiction, nonfiction, and honors individuals for a lifetime of contributions to peace. Dayton, notable for hosting the 1995 negotiations that concluded the Bosnian War, serves as a fitting backdrop for such recognitions. The Dayton Peace Accords, which emerged from those talks, ended a conflict characterized by ethnic cleansing, resulting in the deaths of over 300,000 people and the displacement of a million more.

Rushdie, now 78, achieved global fame with his controversial 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses.” The book’s dream sequence involving the Prophet Muhammad incited accusations of blasphemy and a notorious fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, which forced the Indian-born Rushdie into hiding. The 2022 attack left him blinded in one eye, and the perpetrator, who was not even born at the time of the novel’s publication, received a 25-year prison sentence.

During his acceptance speech, Rushdie reflected on the challenges of writing about peace amid today’s pervasive violence, referencing ongoing conflicts in places like Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan. “A book cannot stop a bullet. A poem cannot intercept a bomb,” he poignantly remarked, acknowledging the limitations of literature in the face of such dire global issues.

“A book cannot stop a bullet. A poem cannot intercept a bomb,” he said.

But through literature, he said, writers can express solidarity with those who are suffering and others on the front lines of conflict zones, such as journalists.

“We can enlarge their voices by adding our voices to their voices,” Rushdie said. “It can show us the reality of the other. It can show us what life looks like, not from our point of view, but from another point of view.”

Authorities said Rushdie’s attacker, Hadi Matar, then 24 and a U.S. citizen, was attempting to carry out the decades-old edict calling for his death when he traveled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target the writer at the summer retreat of Chautauqua, New York, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.

Rushdie published an acclaimed memoir about the attack, “Knife,” in 2024, a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His most recent work, his 23rd, is “The Eleventh Hour,” which includes three novellas and two short stories.

Other past recipients of the lifetime achievement award include former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, feminist movement icon Gloria Steinem and writers Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Barbara Kingsolver, and Studs Terkel. The lifetime achievement award, also known as the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, is named for the American diplomat who was an architect of the Dayton Peace Accords.

Other honorees this year include Kaveh Akbar for his novel, “Martyr!” about a poet and son of Iranian immigrants dealing with a mysterious family past, and Sunil Amrith, for “The Burning Earth,” a history of how the global environment has been shaped by empires, wars and humanity’s increasing freedom of movement.