The Dayton Literary Peace Prize announced the finalists for its awards as well as the winner of its Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.
The prizes are given annually to “adult fiction and nonfiction books published within the past year that have led readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view.”
The winner of this year’s Holbrooke Award, which honors “a writer whose body of work reflects the Prize’s mission of fostering peace, social justice, and global understanding,” is novelist Ann Patchett, author of books including Bel Canto, State of Wonder, and, most recently, Whistler.
“Ann Patchett has spent her career reminding us that literature is a necessity—it is the very medium through which we understand one another,” Nicholas A. Raines, executive director of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, said. “Honoring Ann Patchett with the Holbrooke Award is an act of faith in the power of storytelling to encourage empathy, foster human connection, and lead us toward a more humane world.”
The finalists for the fiction award are Gish Jen for Bad Bad Girl, Roohi Choudhry for Outside Women, Karen Russell for The Antidote, Sam Wachman for The Sunflower Boys, Betty Shamieh for Too Soon, and Charlotte McConaghy for Wild Dark Shore.
In contention for the nonfiction prize are Danielle Leavitt for By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine; Amanda Knox for Free: My Search for Meaning; Kevin Sack for Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church; Eve L. Ewing for Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism; Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull for The Jailhouse Lawyer; and Jack Fairweather for The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle To Bring Nazis to Justice.
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which comes with a cash award of $10,000, was established in 2006. The winners of this year’s prizes will be revealed at a ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, in early November.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
