Rushdie receives Mailer Prize for lifetime achievement

NEW YORK (AP) — Salman Rushdie is this year’s recipient of the Mailer Prize for lifetime achievement.

The author of “Midnight’s Children” and other novels was presented his award by Laurie Anderson at a ceremony Thursday night at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the New York City borough where Norman Mailer was raised and lived off and on until his death in 2007.

Rushdie, like Mailer, is a former president of the American chapter of PEN, the literary and human rights organization. He says Mailer inspired him to help found the PEN World Voices Festival, an annual gathering of writers from around the world.

He also noted that Mailer represented an era when writers often fought and carried on. He says to his “great disappointment,” writers have changed and “everybody behaves really well.”