Salman Rushdie warned that free expression in the U.S. is under sustained pressure from the Trump administration as he accepted the Liberatum Cultural Honor at Camden Town Hall at King’s Cross in London, the same building where he once worked on community relations before becoming one of the world’s most recognized novelists.
The conversation was moderated by Michael Harris, director of programming at Camden Town Hall, who has spent more than 20 years building platforms for free expression and public debate, including founding Guardian Live at The Guardian and serving as editorial director at CogX.
“I was quite involved with community relations in the ’70s in London, particularly with the quite large Bangladeshi community in Camden, and their difficulties, which were considerable,” Rushdie said. “So yeah, I used to come here and bully people to improve the lot of the Bangladesh community.”
The ceremony brought together an international roster of speakers and honorees, including human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, contemporary artist Bharti Kher, poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, The Independent editor-in-chief Geordie Greig and Indian filmmaker Mozez Singh, all appearing in tribute to Rushdie’s decades of work on free expression.
