Rushdie appears at PEN America gala

Salman Rushdie

walked onstage at PEN America’s annual gala Thursday night, his first public appearance since he was stabbed and gravely wounded in an attack in August at a literary event in western New York.

“Well, hi everybody,” Rushdie said, as the crowd at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan greeted him with whoops and a standing ovation. “It’s nice to be back — as opposed to not being back, which was also an

option. I’m pretty glad the dice rolled this way.”

His remarks, just a few minutes long, in accepting an award for courage may have been uncharacteristically terse. But Rushdie, who lost sight in one eye because of the attack, was his voluble self during the cocktail hour, for which he had slipped in through a side door before taking his place for a red-carpet photo op.

Flashbulbs popped. And as the crowd began to notice him, friends headed over for handshakes and hugs.

“I just thought if there’s a right thing to chose as a re-entry, it’s this,” he said. “It’s being part of the world

of books, the fight against censorship and for human rights.”

Comedian Colin Jost ,a head writer on “Saturday Night Live” and the coanchor of its “Weekend Update” segment, got things started with a joke acknowledging the surprise guest. “Nothing puts you at ease at an event like seeing Salman Rushdie,” he said to laughs.

Not to worry, he said, there were snipers in the balcony. “But that’s just in case a drag queen tries to read a child a story.”

Later, there was an award to Lorne Michaels, the creator and longtime executive producer of “Saturday

Night Live.” PEN America recognized him for what it called “four decades of biting satire that has captured the tenor of the moment, probing the norms, restrictions and absurdities of our institutions and the powerful.”

The annual Freedom to Write award went to Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian writer and human rights advocate who has been in and out of prison over the past decade. She is currently in Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran, on charges of “spreading propaganda” and has been subjected to “prolonged solitary confinement and intense psychological torture,” according to