Margaret Atwood, below, accepted the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University in Israel on Monday, telling an interviewer before the ceremony that to snub the honor would be tantamount to “throwing overboard the thousands of writers around the world who are in prison, censored, exiled and murdered for what they have published.” Ms. Atwood, the Canadian author of “The Year of the Flood” and a vice president of International PEN, the literary human rights group, shared the $1 million prize with the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (“Sea of Poppies”). Before the awards ceremony, Ms. Atwood had been urged by Palestinian groups and writers from other countries not to accept the prize as a protest of Israel’s policies toward the Gaza Strip and its artists. But Ms. Atwood was not persuaded, telling Bloomberg News, “We don’t do cultural boycotts.” She added: “Artists don’t have armies. What they do is nuanced, by which I mean it is about human beings, not about propaganda positions.” The Dan David Prize, which its organizers describe as an award for people “who have made an outstanding contribution to humanity, in each of the three time dimensions: past, present, and future,” has previously been given to Tony Blair, Al Gore, Tom Stoppard, Amos Oz and Yo-Yo Ma.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/books/12arts-MARGARETATWO_BRF.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print