BY KAREN BOSSICK
Salman Rushdie will speak at the 2025 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference this coming weekend as the recipient of the conference’s 2025 Writer in the World Prize.
Rushdie, an Indian-born British and American novelist, will speak at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, July 19, in the Sun Valley Pavilion. He’ll be in conversation with National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann, the Irish-American author of “Let the Great World Spin” and a good friend of Rushdie’s.
The talk is open to 2025 Conference passholders only, with restricted access and special security protocols in place. Thoe entering the Pavilion will be screened by security wands. Only clear water bottles will be permitted, and bag check service will be available for those wishing to avoid having their bags checked.
A single entrance at the main staircase of the Pavilion will open for passholders at 4:30 p.m.
There will be no Pavilion Lawn access and individual tickets will not be sold. But free livestreaming will be available at https://svwc.com/media/livestream. And the talk can be watched from the Live Watch Party at The Argyros in Ketchum. The Live Watch Party pass costs $25 and is good for a talk by Doris Kearns Goodwin at 12:30 p.m., a panel discussion about memoirs at 2:15 p.m. and a talk by Dan Jones on “The Life and Times of Henry V" at 3:45 p.m.
Full Conference Passholders can also view a simulcast of the talk live in the Sun Valley Opera House with closed-captioning.
Rushdie is the author of 25 fiction and nonfiction books, perhaps most notably “The Satanic Verses,” which resulted in Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa in1989 calling for Rusdie to be killed. Rushdie went into hiding, restricting public appearances for more than a decade.
His latest book, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” is a personal account of surviving an attempt on his life in August 2022, when a man stabbed him multiple times onstage before a lecture Rushdie was to give at the Chautauqua Institution in New York.
Rushdie later told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that he had a premonition of the event days beforehand. The assailant was found guilty of attempted murder and assault in February 2025 and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Rushdie calls “Knife” a love story written for his wife Eliza and the doctors and physical therapists who helped him recover, along with his global community of readers and fellow writers.
The Writer in the World Prize was established in 2021 by SVWC board members to recognize writers whose works express both literary talent and moral imagination, helping readers to better understand the world and their place in it. It comes with a $20,000 prize funded by SVWC board members.
Past recipients honored for their contributions to the global canon of literature have included Barry Lopez, Abraham Verghese and Margaret Atwood.
The 2025 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, which typically sells out in hours, will kick off on Saturday, July 19, and run through Monday, July 21, at the Sun Valley Pavilion. Presenters include Evan Osnos, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Ruth Reichl and Jonathan Blitzer.