Dayton Literary Peace Prize

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2025 Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke
Distinguished Achievement Award

Salman Rushdie

“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 

Salman Rushdie, 2025 Holbrooke Winner
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Bio

Salman Rushdie is the author of fifteen novels—Luka and the Fire of Life; Grimus; Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Stories; The Moor’s Last Sigh; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown; The Enchantress of Florence; Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights; The Golden House; Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize); and Victory City—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published six works of nonfiction—The Jaguar Smile; Imaginary Homelands; Step Across This Line; Joseph Anton; Languages of Truth; and Knife (which was a finalist for the National Book Award)—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN America, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

2025 Fiction Winner

Martyr by Kaveh Akbar

“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

KAVEH AKBAR’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City.

2025 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.

2025 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. 

2025 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 Post. Red Memory is her first book. She lives in London.

2025 Finalists

Fiction

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
(Alfred A. Knopf)

A novel of resilience and hope set in Sarajevo, 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect barricades, splitting the city into ethnic enclaves. Each morning, the locals—whether Bosniak, Croat, or Serb—push them aside. When violence finally erupts, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her family away to safety. She stays behind, reluctant to believe that hostilities will last. As the city falls under siege, her home is laid to waste, yet Zora finds ways to rebuild, over and over.

Freedom is a Feast by Alejandro Puyana
(Little, Brown and Company)

In 1964, young rebel Stanislavo joins the leftist movement in the jungles of Venezuela. There, he meets Emiliana, a nurse and fellow revolutionary. Their budding romance is upended by a decision with consequences that echo across generations. Decades later, on the eve of the attempted coup against President Chávez, María, a single mother, encounters Stanislavo after her son is wounded by a stray bullet—a twist of fate that gives Stanislavo one final chance to atone before it’s too late.

James by Percival Everett
(Penguin Random House, Doubleday)

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
(Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House US)

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

The Good Deed by Helen Benedict
(Red Hen Press)

Set in 2018 against the backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful Greek island of Samos, The Good Deed follows the stories of four women living in the camp and an American tourist who comes to Samos to escape her own dark secret.

When the tourist does a ‘good deed,’ she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

The Women by Kristin Hannah
(St. Martin’s Publishing Group)

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country have too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.

Nonfiction

A Map of Future Ruins by Lauren Markham
(Penguin Random House, Riverhead Books)

In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece in search of her heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that destroyed the largest refugee camp in Europe, for which six young Afghan refugees had been arrested. Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative: in this trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, myth, memoir, and essay, she helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don’t just explain what happened. They predict the future.

John Lewis by David Greenberg
(Simon & Schuster)

Born into poverty in rural Alabama, John Lewis rose to prominence in the civil rights movement, becoming second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions. David Greenberg’s “authoritative…definitive biography” (David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author) follows Lewis’s journey beyond the civil rights era through a narrative that weaves together exclusive interviews, never-before-seen FBI files, and documents, offering profound insights into his significant role in American history and the civil rights movement.

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen
(Penguin Random House, Dutton)

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor
(Pantheon Books, Penguin Random House)

In Solidarity, two renowned organizers and activists offer the first in-depth examination of the concept, surveying its past, present, and future across borders of nation, identity, and class. They ask how we might build solidarity in an era of staggering inequality, polarization, violence, and ecological catastrophe and insist that, both as a principle and a practice, it must be cultivated and institutionalized, so that care for the common good becomes the central aim of politics and social life.

The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith
(W. W. Norton & Company)

In The Burning Earth, historian Sunil Amrith relates in gorgeous prose how the imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith has written a mind-altering epic—vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images—in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.

The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora by Wendy Pearlman
(Liveright Publishing)

Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, The Home I Worked to Make shares stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home for Syrians dispersed by war. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement.

Read the press release.

2025 Finalist Judges

Fiction

Jung Yun headshot

Jung Yun

Jung Yun is the author of O BEAUTIFUL, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year, and SHELTER, which was long listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Her short fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, The Indiana Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, among others. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and serves on the board of directors at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Her forthcoming novel is ALL THE WORLD CAN HOLD, which will be published in March 2026 by 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster.

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

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Beth Nguyen

Beth Nguyen is the author of the memoirs Owner of a Lonely Heart and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award, and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Essays. Nguyen is the Dorothy Draheim Professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

 

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.

2025 Awards Ceremony

The 2024 Awards Ceremony was held at 5:00 pm on Sunday, November 10th, 2024, at the Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center at One West Second Street in Dayton, Ohio. Gilbert King was the Master of Ceremonies.

2025 Award Winners and Runners-up

Richard C. Holbrooke Award President Jimmy Carter

Fiction Award Paul Lynch for Prophet Song

Nonfiction Award Victor Luckerson for Built From The Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street

Fiction Runner-up Anne Berest for The Postcard

Nonfiction Runner-up Tania Branigan for Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution

2025 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.

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