Paul Lynch and Victor Luckerson are the winners of this year’s Dayton Literary Peace Prize, given annually to “writers whose work demonstrates the power of the written word to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding.”
Lynch took home the fiction prize for Prophet Song, his novel about a woman in a dystopian Ireland whose unionist husband is detained by secret police. The book won the Booker Prize and is a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.
The Postcard, written by Anne Berest and translated by Tina Kover, was named the runner-up in the fiction category.
Luckerson won the nonfiction award for Built From the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street. The book tells the story of the Black entrepreneurial neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was destroyed in the infamous 1921 race massacre.
The nonfiction runner-up was Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution, which won the Cundill History Prize and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize.
Former President Jimmy Carter, a prolific author and Pulitzer Prize finalist for An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood, was awarded the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize was established in 2006. Previous winners include Chang-rae Lee for The Surrendered, Geraldine Brooks for Horse, and Chanel Miller for Know My Name.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
