Salman Rushdie: America Is ‘Having a Difficult Moment’ on Free Speech

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.

Rushdie discussed writing his Booker-winning “Midnight’s Children” during his years working in Camden. “‘Midnight’s Children’ was like an act of reclamation,” Rushdie said. “The city of Bombay [now Mumbai] is a city largely built on land reclaimed from the sea, so the city itself is an act of reclamation. Both the novel as the subject of the novel and the act of the novel were an act of reclamation.”

He also discussed his subsequent novel, 1988’s “The Satanic Verses,” which caused a furore around the world and led to a fatwa on his head. “I’ve always thought of ‘The Satanic Verses’ as my London novel,” Rushdie said. “It’s mostly a novel about London in the ’80s, at a time when race relations were quite tense, and which I had direct experience of because of those years of working in Camden.”

Rushdie was asked about the response to the novel from parts of the community he had worked alongside. “It was and is very painful,” Rushdie said. “There’s a street which is like a fictionalized version of Brick Lane, and the idea that the people living on that street afterwards marched against the book was just horrifying. And it continues to be, because of course, none of them had read it. Something they have in common with the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Rushdie extended the point to the broader history of literary censorship. “If you look at the history of the persecution of books, it’s very often the case the persecutors have not read the book,” Rushdie said. “100%.”

Turning to free expression more broadly, Rushdie said, “America is having a very difficult moment in this area. We have an administration, and its cohorts, who are really going after one of the most important things about America — the free speech — particularly when they come to speak in Europe, doing their best to suppress it at home.”

Rushdie pointed to book removals in American schools. “There are schools in states in America where one parent can object to a book in a school library, and the book is withdrawn,” Rushdie said. “That’s happening in the thousands of titles across America. And these are not just any old books, this is ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ this is Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’”

“There is a conscious attempt to erase that part of American history, which is, in many ways, the original sin of the United States, that is, enslavement,” Rushdie added. “There is a fight back. It’s not all bad news — various organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, American PEN and many others, are going to court and winning cases.”

Rushdie also discussed his decision to live in the U.S. “The reason people like me went to live in America was in large part because of the First Amendment,” Rushdie said. “I thought the idea that free speech is defended by the Constitution is a good thing for a country to do. I also really liked that the Constitution guaranteed, amongst other things, the pursuit of happiness.”

Asked to define his approach to free expression, Rushdie said: “My view about free speech is that the burden of proof must always lie on the censor. The default setting is that everybody talks.”

Rushdie also discussed his sense of home across the places he has lived. “I’ve always used the metaphor of the banyan tree, which is the tree that spreads by putting down roots from its branches,” Rushdie said. “I think the phenomenon of movement, so many of us now end up in places which are not the place that we began — that’s what happens to us, multiple roots. I feel quite deep roots here. I still feel those roots in India, and then I lived in America for 26, 27 years, and I feel a sense of home there, too. I just think it’s a piece of good fortune to have roots in many places.”

Rushdie was stabbed multiple times in August 2022 by Hadi Matar as he prepared to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, an attack that left him blind in one eye. Matar was convicted of attempted murder in February 2025 and sentenced to 25 years in prison that May. The attack is also the subject of “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” a documentary directed by Alex Gibney, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year.

Harris also asked Rushdie about his most recent book, “The Eleventh Hour.” “This was the first effort of going back to fiction after the attack against me,” Rushdie said. “It was a book that happened rather than a book that was willed.”