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Dayton Literary Peace Prize winners announced

By Laura Dempsey

Staff Writer

Thursday, September 04, 2008

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize has announced its winners for 2008:

For fiction, Junot Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" was chosen; in the nonfiction category, "Brother, I'm Dying" by Edwidge Danticat is the winner.

Runners-up are "Lost City Radio" by Daniel Alarcon (fiction) and "Are We Rome?" by Cullen Murphy (nonfiction).

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States, celebrating the power of literature to promote peace and non-violent conflict resolution. It was founded in 2006 as an outgrowth of the Dayton Peace Prize, which commemorates the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords ending the war in Bosnia.

Winners receive a $10,000 honorarium and runners-up receive $1,000. A panel of writers, including Gerald Early, Amy Hempel, Jane McCafferty and Katherine Vaz, selected this year's winners and runners-up. They will be honored at a gala in Dayton on Sunday, Sept. 28, at the Schuster Center downtown.

Earlier this year, civil rights movement historian Taylor Branch ("America in the King Years" trilogy) was selected as this year's Lifetime Achievement Award. Past Lifetime Achievement honorees include Elie Wiesel (2007) and Studs Terkel (2006).

For more information on the awards and the gala, visit www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2403 or ldempsey@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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