Two books that explore the lasting impact of war have won the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction and nonfiction.

“The Sojourn” by Andrew Krivak and “To End All Wars” by Adam Hochschild have each earned a $10,000 prize that will be presented on Veterans Day, Sunday November 11, at a ceremony hosted by award-winning journalist Nick Clooney. The event will be at the Schuster Center in Dayton.

The prestigious award, inspired by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, is the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States. Runners-up, “Nanjing Requiem” by Ha Jin and “Day of Honey” by Annia Ciezadlo, each will receive $1,000.

Author Tim O’Brien is the recipient of the 2012 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, formerly known as the Lifetime Achievement Award. O’Brien, who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War, has authored “The Things They Carried,” “In the Lake of the Woods,” and “Going After Cacciato.”

Sharon Rab, founder of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, said the award celebrates the power of literature to promote peace and global understanding.

“This Veterans Day, we will honor five writers whose work examines the many ways that war challenges individual morality,” said Rab. “As Americans wrestle with the ethical dilemmas inherent to being citizens of a nation at war, these authors present us with role models and object lessons to help guide us.”

To be eligible for this year’s awards, English-language books must have been published or translated into English in 2011 and address the theme of peace on a variety of levels.

First time novelist Andrew Krivak, whose book was nominated for a National Book Award, has said “The Sojourn” (Bellevue Literary Press) came from stories his grandmother and mother told “of a time and place in ‘the old country’ during the Great War, when peace was not easily found, yet men and women lived and died hoping for it.”

It’s the story of Jozef Vinich who returns with his father from a 19th-century Colorado mining town to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary only to be uprooted again by World War I.

In “To End All Wars” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), author Adam Hochschild “brings World War I to life as never before by focusing on the long-ignored critics of the conflict.”

In The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.”

“Almost every war begins with the expectation of a swift and easy victory that will solve a problem,” Hochschild is quoted as saying in the announcement. “Seldom does this happen. This was the illusion that drove the world into war in 1914, and that has driven the United States into two disastrous wars in the last decade. Can we learn from history? I hope so—that’s why I keep writing it.”

A panel of prominent writers, including Christopher Cerf, Alan Cheuse, Kenneth McClane, and April Smith, reviewed the 2012 finalists and selected this year’s winners and runners-up. A full list of the 2012 finalists can be found at: http://www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org/2012-finalists.htm.