The latest honor for Salman Rushdie was a prize kept secret until minutes before he rose from his seat to accept it.

On Tuesday night, the author received the first-ever Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award, presented by the Vaclav Havel Center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Only a handful of the more than 100 attendees had advance notice about Rushdie, whose whereabouts have largely been withheld from the general public since he was stabbed repeatedly in August of 2022 during a literary festival in Western New York.

“I apologize for being a mystery guest,” Rushdie said Tuesday night after being introduced by “Reading Lolita in Tehran” author Azar Nafisi. “I don’t feel at all mysterious. But it made life a little simpler.”