Dayton Literary Peace Prize

2024 Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke
Distinguished Achievement Award

President Jimmy Carter

Throughout his long and remarkable life, my President Jimmy Carter has had many passions. Two of his most enduring interests have been a devotion to literature and a near-constant pursuit of a peaceful resolution to conflict. It is gratifying to have the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation choose to honor my grandfather with the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award for a lifetime of work melding two of his loves—literature and peace.

From authoring more than 30 books to brokering peace among nations both in office and as a private citizen, and his dedication to human rights for everyone around the world, my grandfather’s lifetime of work is wide-reaching. The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation’s recognition of his unshakable commitment to finding words that inspire world leaders and people across the globe is a great honor and a wonderful acknowledgment of how my grandfather has helped shape history.

I look forward to being in Dayton to personally accept this award on behalf of my grandfather, President Jimmy Carter, and to celebrate and discuss his tireless and ongoing devotion to exploring the many paths to peace through the written word.

— Jason Carter 

Bio

Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.), thirty-ninth president of the United States, was born Oct. 1, 1924, in the small farming town of Plains, Georgia, and grew up in the nearby community of Archery. His father, James Earl Carter, Sr., was a farmer and businessman; his mother, Lillian Gordy Carter, a registered nurse.

He was educated in the public school of Plains, attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, New York, where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine.

On July 7, 1946, he married Rosalynn Smith of Plains. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his naval commission and returned with his family to Georgia. He took over the Carter farms, and he and Rosalynn operated Carter’s Warehouse, a general-purpose seed and farm supply company in Plains. He quickly became a leader of the community, serving on county boards supervising education, the hospital authority, and the library. In 1962 he won election to the Georgia Senate. He lost his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966, but won the next election, becoming Georgia’s 76th governor on January 12, 1971. He was the Democratic National Committee campaign chairman for the 1974 congressional and gubernatorial elections.

President Jimmy Carter
On Dec. 12, 1974, he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. He won his party’s nomination on the first ballot at the 1976 Democratic National Convention and was elected president on Nov. 2, 1976.

Jimmy Carter served as president from Jan. 20, 1977 to Jan. 20, 1981. Significant foreign policy accomplishments of his administration included the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords, the treaty of peace between Egypt and Israel, the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, and the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. He championed human rights throughout the world. On the domestic side, the administration’s achievements included a comprehensive energy program conducted by a new Department of Energy; deregulation in energy, transportation, communications, and finance; major educational programs under a new Department of Education; and major environmental protection legislation, including the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which doubled the size of the national park system and tripled the wilderness areas.

Books & Accomplishments
Carter is the author of thirty-two books, many of which are now in revised editions: Why Not the Best? (1975, 1996), A Government as Good as Its People (1977, 1996), Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President(1982, 1995), Negotiation: The Alternative to Hostility (1984, 2003), The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East (1985, 1993, 2007), Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, written with Rosalynn Carter (1987, 1995), An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections (1988, 1994), Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age (1992), Talking Peace: A Vision for the Next Generation (1993, 1995), Always a Reckoning and Other Poems,(1995), The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, illustrated by Amy Carter (1995), Living Faith (1996), Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith (1997), The Virtues of Aging (1998), An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood (2001), Christmas in Plains: Memories (2001), The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (2002), The Hornet’s Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War (2003), Sharing Good Times (2004), Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis (2005), Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (2006, 2007), Beyond the White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope (2007), A Remarkable Mother (2008), We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work (2009), White House Diary (2010), Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President (2011), as general editor, NIV Lessons from the Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter, revised as NSRV Simple Faith Bible (2012, 2020), A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power (2014), The Paintings of Jimmy Carter (2014), A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety(2015), The Craftsmanship of Jimmy Carter (2018), and Faith: A Journey for All (2018).

Until 2020, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter volunteered one week a year for Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that helps needy people in the United States and in other countries renovate and build homes for themselves. He also taught Sunday school in the Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains. The Carters have three sons, one daughter, nine grandsons (one deceased), three granddaughters, five great-grandsons, and nine great-granddaughters.

On December 10, 2002, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002 to Jimmy Carter “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

2024 Fiction Winner

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

I am pleased and honoured to be awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize which recognises the power of fiction to promote peace. The human cost of war is a story that must be retold again and again and it is our duty as artists to find new ways to tell it. The life of every human being is unto themselves a world.  

— Paul Lynch

Bio

Paul Lynch

is the author of five novels. His most recent novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize. He has previously won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and France’s Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel, among other prizes. He has been shortlisted for many international awards, including the UK’s Walter Scott Prize, Italy’s Strega European Prize, France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, Prix Littérature-Monde, and the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. In 2024, he was appointed Distinguished Writing Fellow at Maynooth University and was elected to Aosdána, the Irish academy for the arts honoring distinguished artists. His novels have been translated into 35 languages.

2024 Fiction Runner-up

The Postcard by Anne Berest

To receive an award that honors peace is especially significant to me, not only as a writer, but as a Frenchwoman and citizen of this world. I am deeply moved.

—Anne Berest

Bio

Anne Berest is the bestselling co-author of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Doubleday, 2014) and the author of a novel based on the life of French writer Françoise Sagan. With her sister Claire, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse. She is the great-granddaughter of the painter Francis Picabia. For her work as a writer and prize-winning showrunner, she has been profiled in publications such as French Vogue and Haaretz newspaper. The recipient of numerous literary awards in France, The Postcard was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize and has been a long-selling bestseller in France. The Postcard was published in English on Tuesday May 16 and is her first novel to appear in English translation.

2024 Nonfiction Winner

Built From The Fire by Victor Luckerson

When I entered the world of Greenwood, I wanted to write a book about creation rather than destruction. The Dayton Literary Peace Prize amplifies that mission by highlighting the ingenuity and perseverance of this community. I’m grateful for the honor.

—Victor Luckerson

Bio

Victor Luckerson is a journalist and author based in Tulsa who works to bring neglected black history to light. He is a former staff writer at The Ringer and business reporter for Time magazine. His writing and research have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wired, and Smithsonian. He was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his reporting in Time on the 1923 Rosewood Massacre. He also manages an email newsletter about underexplored aspects of black history called Run It Back. 

2024 Nonfiction Runner-up

Red Memory by Tania Branigan

I’m truly honoured to be recognised in this way by the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among such remarkable and thoughtful titles.   

—Tania Branigan

Bio

Tania Branigan writes editorials for the Guardian and spent seven years as its China correspondent, reporting on politics, the economy, and social changes. Her work has also appeared in the Washington PostRed Memory is her first book. She lives in London.

2024 Finalists

Fiction

A History of Burning by Janika Oza (Grand Central Publishing)

In 1972, the entire family is forced to flee under Idi Amin’s military dictatorship. Pirbhai’s grandchildren are now scattered across the world, struggling to find their way back to each other. One day a letter arrives with news that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure their own place in the world.

Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai (Algonquin Books)

From the internationally bestselling author of The Mountains Sing, Dust Child brings the struggles, courage, and the search for identity of Amerasians to life. Moving between wartime and modern-day Việt Nam, the novel delves into the tragically entwined lives of two Vietnamese sisters, a veteran who returns to Việt Nam after more than forty years, and a Black Amerasian searching for the parents who abandoned him.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Grove Atlantic)

Winner of the Booker Prize 2023 and a critically acclaimed instant national bestseller, Prophet Song is a shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together. When scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack finds officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her doorstep looking for her husband, she is forced to contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. To save her family, what—or who—is she willing to leave behind?

River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer (Berkley)

When the master of the Providence plantation in Barbados announces the Emancipation Act of 1834 means not freedom, but apprenticeship, Rachel does the only thing she can – she runs. Driven by the certainty that a mother cannot be truly free without knowing what has become of her children, Rachel begins a desperate search to find the children slavery ripped away from her, journeying across the Caribbean to piece her family back together and prove there’s nothing more powerful than a mother’s love.

The Postcard by Anne Berest (Europa Editions)

An anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest home in Paris bearing the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents and two of their children—all four killed at Auschwitz. Anne is moved to discover who sent it and why. What emerges is a poignant mother-daughter novel, a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, and a breathtaking saga of a family devastated by the the horrors of the twentieth-century and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

We Meant Well by Erum Shazia Hasan (ECW Press)

It’s the middle of the night in Los Angeles when Maya, a married mother of one, is summoned by her charity to manage a crisis. Her colleague is accused of raping a girl in an African village, causing her to question her identity, privilege, and allegiance. As Maya feels the pleasures, freedoms, and humanity of life in Likanni, she recognizes that her American life is inextricably woven into this violent reality — and that dishonesty in one place affects the realities in another.

Nonfiction

An Inconvenient Cop by Edwin Raymond with Jon Sternfeld (Viking)

From the highest-ranking whistleblower in NYPD history, An Inconvenient Cop is a gripping insider look at the complexities of modern policing and the urgent need for reform. At once revelatory and galvanizing, Edwin Raymond courageously bears witness to and exposes institutional violence, presenting a vision of radical hope that makes the case for a world in which the police’s responsibility is not to arrest numbers but to the people.

Built From the Fire by Victor Luckerson (Random House)

Built From the Fire is a multigenerational saga of a family and community in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known nationally as “Black Wall Street,” that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification. It follows four generations of the Goodwin family, from their survival of the massacre and the long life of their newspaper that chronicled Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry to their involvement in Oklahoma politics and Greenwood’s revival today.

All Else Failed by Dana Sachs (Bellevue Literary Press)

In 2015, as hundreds of thousands of displaced people sought refuge in Europe, the international aid system collapsed. All Else Failed is Dana Sachs’s eyewitness account of the successes—and failures—of the volunteer relief network that emerged to meet the enormous need. Closely following the odysseys of seven individual men and women, and their families, Sachs tells a story of despair and resilience, revealing the humanity within an immense humanitarian disaster.

Red Memory by Tania Branigan (W.W. Norton)

“It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins. Through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness, Branigan offers an indelible exploration of the invisible scar that runs through the heart of Chinese society and the souls of its citizens.

The Talk by Darrin Bell (Henry Holt)

The Talk examines how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles—and finding a voice through cartooning—Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbors, and police officers and thus of his mortality. Drawing attention to the brutal murders of African Americans and showcasing revealing insights along the way, as an adult he must decide whether he and his own six-year-old son are ready to have The Talk.

Who Gets Believed? by Dina Nayeri (Catapult)

Why are honest people dismissed as liars? Former refugee and award-winning author Dina Nayeri begins here, turning to shocking and illuminating case studies in this book, which grows into a reckoning with our culture’s views on believability. For readers of David Grann, Malcolm Gladwell, and Atul Gawande, Who Gets Believed? is as deeply personal as it is profound in its reflections on morals, language, human psychology, and the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.

2024 Finalist Judges

Fiction

DLPP2024_Judge_Kali Fajardo-Anstine_credit Estevan Ruiz

Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the bestselling author of the novel Woman of Light (Random House, 2022), winner of the Reading the West Award in Fiction, the Women Writing the West Willa Award in Historical Fiction, and nominated for the Colorado Book Award, the Carol Shields Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Fajardo-Anstine’s first book is the widely acclaimed short story collection Sabrina & Corina (Random House, 2019), a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, the Story Prize, the Saroyan International Prize, and winner of a American Book Award and a Reading the West Award in Fiction. Fajardo-Anstine’s honors include awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Denver Mayor’s office. She is the 2022 – 2024 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. Fajardo-Anstine has served as a judge for the Clark Prize and The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Durham, North Carolina - June 28, 2024 - Michael Parker's latest novel is "I Am the Light of This World."

Michael Parker

Michael Parker is the author of eight novels – Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, If You Want Me To Stay, The Watery Part of the World, All I Have In This World, Prairie Fever, and I Am the Light of This World–and three collections of stories, The Geographical Cure, Don’t Make Me Stop Now and Everything, Then and Since. His work has appeared in journals including the Georgia Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, New England Review, Southwest Review, Trail Runner, Runner’s World and Men’s Journal. He has received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart and New Stories from the South anthologies, and he is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.

Nonfiction

DLPP2024_Judge_Peter Ho Davies

Peter Ho Davies

Peter Ho Davies’ most recent books are the novel A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself and his first work of nonfiction The Art of Revision: The Last Word. Other books include The Fortunes, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Welsh Girl, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and a London Times bestseller; as well as two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. A recipient of the PEN/Malamud and PEN/Macmillan awards, his fiction has appeared in HarpersThe AtlanticThe Paris Review and Granta and been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. 

DLPP2024_Judge_Margaret Lazarus Dean_2
Margaret Lazarus Dean

Margaret Lazarus Dean is the author of Leaving Orbit, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and a New York Times top ten book of 2015. She is also the co-writer, with Scott Kelly, of his New York Times bestselling memoir Endurance as well as the author of a novel, The Time It Takes to Fall. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf and has been awarded residencies with MacDowell and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, the New Yorker, and Popular Mechanics, among others; she has served as a judge for the American Academy in Berlin fellowship, the AWP Grace Paley Prize, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowships. She lives in Knoxville, where she is Lindsay Young Professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee.

2024 Awards Ceremony

The 2023 Awards Ceremony was held at 5:00 pm on Sunday, November 12th, 2023, at the Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center at One West Second Street in Dayton, Ohio. Gilbert King was the Master of Ceremonies.

2024 Award Winners and Runners-up

Richard C. Holbrooke Award Sandra Cisneros

Fiction Award Geraldine Brooks for Horse

Nonfiction Award Robert Samuels & Toluse Olorunnipa for His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Fiction Runner-up Lily Brooks-Dalton for The Light Pirate

Nonfiction Runner-up Adam Hochschild for American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

2024 Master of Ceremonies

Gilbert King

Gilbert King is the writer, producer, and host of Bone Valley, a nine-part narrative podcast about murder and injustice in 1980s central Florida, from Lava for Good podcasts. He is the author of three books, most recently, Beneath a Ruthless Sun. His previous book, Devil in the Grove, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2013. A New York Times bestseller, the book was also named runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. King has written about race, civil rights, and the death penalty for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and he was a 2019-2020 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. King’s earlier book, The Execution of Willie Francis, was published in 2008. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

DLPP 2022_headshot_GilbertKing