Stockholm - Threatened Italian author Roberto Saviano and British-Indian author Salman Rushdie have accepted invitations to lecture at the Swedish Academy, the body that selects the Nobel literature prize said Tuesday.

Saviano and Rushdie were to speak November 25 on the theme "Freedom of speech and lawless violence."

The academy extended the invitations last month.

Saviano's book, Gomorra, has angered the mafia, or Camorra, in Naples. He has been forced to live under police protection and in a recent newspaper interview said that he was considering leaving Italy.

Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 issued a death threat against Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses.

Khomeini's threat, proclaimed in a so-called fatwa, triggered a heated debate in the academy and led to a split.

Two of the 18 members, who are appointed for life, gave up active work to protest the academy's decision not condemn the death threat.

One of the protesting members, author Kerstin Ekman, in a letter to the Stockholm daily Expressen recently urged the academy to condemn the threats against Saviano.

Nobel literature laureates Gunter Grass of Germany, Orhan Pamuk pof Turkey and Italian Dario Fo have expresssed support for Saviano, as have Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader.

The literature prize is one the prizes endowed by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won this year's award.

Nobel also endowed prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry, and peace. The award ceremonies are held December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's 1896 death in San Remo, Italy. (dpa)