Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities

Programs & Initiatives

Medal for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts and Humanities

Salman Rushdie, Spring 2006

Salman Rushdie is an internationally known author of fiction and non-fiction. He is also the recipient of a myriad of literary awards as well as eight honorary doctorates. His second novel, Midnight’s Children, won the Booker Award in 1981, and subsequently the “Booker of Bookers” Prize in 1993, selected as the best novel to be awarded the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years. Among his other positions, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, an Honorary Professor of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the President of PEN American Center. He is among the most prominent and respected writers of our time, an original mind and relative force, a public intellectual, an articulate spokesperson for the obligations of writers, and a steadfast champion of intellectual freedom.

Medal Ceremony Laudatio, read by Dr. Eva Pell, Senior Vice President for Research

On behalf of the Pennsylvania State University, I am honored to present Mr. Salman Rushdie with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities “Medal for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts and Humanities”. In choosing Mr. Rushdie as the first recipient of this annual award, its standards now seem set impossibly high for the future.

Author of sixteen books – of both fiction and non-fiction – winner of almost every significant literary award – the Arts Council Writers Award, the Booker prize, the Best of the Booker, the Writers Guild Award, the Prix Colette, the Whitbread, the Budapest Prize (to name only a few) – Salman Rushdie’s work has helped to define the possibilities of literature in our times. He is a writer of uncommon eloquence who has shown us new ways in which language can be beautiful while, at the same time, open up hidden possibilities of our selves and our world. A writer who lives at frontiers – between the self and the world, waking and dreaming, history and myth – his work has taken the measure of the transformations of our times. Simply put: Salman Rushdie’s work reminds us that, in his own words, “the novel, as its name suggests, is about the making of the new” and we can say in return that his own writing has never ceased being anything less than exemplary in this regard.

While these achievements alone more than merit the award we present to Mr. Rushdie this evening, it should also be said that he has been a steadfast and powerful voice on behalf of intellectual freedom. His position as President of PEN America is but one of the many ways in which he has worked to champion the cause of literature, the freedom of speech, and the need – as well as the right – for the imagination to live without shackles. For all of these reasons – and many more – please join me in thanking Salman Rushdie for his great contributions to the arts and the humanities.