Inaugurated in 2006, the Dayton awards represent the first and only annual U.S. literary award that recognizes the power of the written word to promote peace. The nominations come from books published within the past year that have led readers to a better understanding of other cultures, people, religions and political points of view.
For the first time in the history of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, women comprise four out of the five honorees. The 2014 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, named in honor of the U.S. diplomat who helped negotiate the Dayton Peace Accords, will go to Louise Erdrich, best known for her depiction of Native-American life. A native of North Dakota, Erdrich is the daughter of an Ojibwe-French mother and German-American father.
Her wide variety of work includes 14 novels as well as poetry, short stories, children’s books and a memoir of early motherhood.
A panel of prominent writers, including Faith Adiele, Michelle Latiolais, Lee Martin, Rubén Martínez and Maureen McCoy, reviewed the 2014 finalists and selected this year’s winners and runners-up. Acording to Sharon Rab, founder and co-chair of the event, 80 nominations were received this year.
“We are grateful for the insight the 2014 winning books — “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” by Robert Shacochis and “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here” by Karima Bennoune — give the reader as they explore the origin and consequences of fundamentalist terrorism at a time when the world is dealing with the terrorist threat to peace,” Rab said.
We had the opportunity to pose some questions to four of tonight’s honorees, who share thoughts about their books.
2014 Fiction Winner: “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” by Bob Shacochis
According to the Dayton Literary Peace Prize committee, in “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul,” Shacochis sweeps through four countries over a span of 50 years and multiple wars, unraveling tangled knots of romance, espionage and vengeance while tracing the coming of age of pre-9/11 America.
Q. What inspired you to write this book?
A. In 1994-95, I was a war correspondent in Haiti during the American invasion and occupation of the island and during that time I met a young freelance photojournalist who told me she had lost her soul and asked me to take her to a voodoo priest. Her story becomes a vehicle to personalize and dramatize America's compulsion to export what we want to call democracy across the planet, and in this case specifically, to the Muslim world.
Q. How did you go about researching the subject?
A. I simply lived my life as an American born inside the Beltway, growing up among the most powerful people in the world, joining the Peace Corps and becoming a writer and a foreign correspondent. As far-fetched as it might seem to the average reader, I am writing about what I know and the people that I've known for decades
Q. What do you hope readers will take away from reading your book?
A. Any reader who survives my book will have to acknowledge the fact that America is, and always has been, a militaristic society, that our aggressive idealism is part and parcel of our culture, and that our moral complacency about our aggression is part of the problem and we must hold ourselves accountable for the moral consequences of that problem.
Q. How do you feel about winning the Dayton Literary Peace Prize?
A. It goes without saying that winning the Dayton Prize is an immeasurable honor, although President Obama and the Nobel committee certainly have skewed the meaning of the intention of a Peace Prize.
Q. What is the biggest challenge about being a writer?
A. For me personally, the biggest challenge of being a writer is making no money.
2014 Non-Fiction Winner: "Your Fatwa Does not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism" by Karima Bennoune
Bennoune, prize organizers say, profiles trailblazers across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and beyond who risked persecution and even death to combat the rising tide of fundamentalism within their own countries.
Q. What inspired you to write this book?
A. I wrote for both personal and political reasons. I watched my own father battle extremism in his home country of Algeria — armed only with his pen and his voice — throughout the "dark decade" of the 1990s.
I wanted to help change that in contemporary settings. As a result, I set out to meet people like my dad and his colleagues, doing the same work today from Mali to Afghanistan. I wanted to tell their stories to English-speaking readers, and to try to garner for them more of the international support they so desperately need. In the era of ISIS, this has never been so important. These “untold” stories — of Malian teachers keeping their schools open under jihadist occupation, or of Iraqi women wearing bullet proof vests but continuing to speak out — must become stories that we all know about – so that they may have happier endings than some of those tragic accounts shared with me. This was a labor of love, of anger and of hope.
Q. How did you go about researching the subject and themes for this book?
A. I interviewed nearly 300 people from some 30 Muslim majority countries or diaspora contexts — from Afghanistan to Mali — to find out how they fought extremism peacefully and to hear how they had been victimized by those claiming to act in the name of God. I visited displaced persons camps, centers for victims of terror, women's organizations, universities, homes, schools, slums, Kabul Stadium and Tahrir Square.
Q. What do you hope readers will take away from reading your book?
A. I hope they will understand how many people of Muslim heritage have fought fundamentalism and how many sacrifices they have made to do so. I hope they will never generalize about the people we simply call Muslims.
Q. How do you feel about winning this prize?
A. The greatest part of winning the prize for me was being able to call and email some of the families of the victims of fundamentalist atrocities whose stories are in my book and share the news with them that the account of their loved ones' heroism was being recognized with an international award. It was especially poignant with the Algerian activists and victims, because the day the award was announced was the same day as the horrific news of the beheading of French rock climber Hervé Gourdel by an ISIS allied group in Algeria.
I am filled with gratitude to the organizers of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and to the selection committee, for offering us this ray of hope in dark times, and for helping to acknowledge with the prize that people of Muslim heritage everywhere are fighting back against those who claim to kill in the name of Islam — and that their struggles matter and are the best road to peace.
Q. What do you love about being a writer?
A. I think the thing I love most about both reading and writing is the process of sharing with others. This is paradoxical because the process of writing for me also necessitates a lot of time alone. To write this book, I locked myself up in my grandmother's old house with all my research materials for endless months.
Q. What are the biggest challenges of being a writer?
A. My biggest challenge is time. I am a law professor and love helping to educate the next generation of human rights lawyers, and I am also an activist with groups like the network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws.
2014 Fiction Runner-Up: "Wash" by Margaret Wrinkle
Through the character of Wash, a first-generation slave, this haunting first novel explores the often-buried history of slave breeding in the early 19th century, offering fresh insights into our continuing racial dilemmas.
Q. What inspired you to write this book?
A. This book grew directly from the fact that I'm a seventh-generation Southerner, born in Birmingham, Ala., in July of 1963, just after King's campaign and just before the bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church that September. I was born into a racially charged landscape and grew up in one. And like many white children in that era, some of my earliest and strongest bonds were with the black people who were being paid to take care of me. But in a still segregated world, these profound relationships were not supposed to be acknowledged, so I grew up crossing racial boundaries carrying divided loyalties. I think I've spent the rest of my life trying to capture the whole of this particular story.
After years of working toward racial reconciliation, I began to get the haunting feeling that the energy patterns laid down during hundreds of years of slavery remain with us, shaping our behavior, our beliefs, our myths and our vision. I already knew that two very different world views had come together within the crucible of slavery to create this country, but I was just starting to understand that this original clash of world views was still reverberating, still unfolding, even now.
Then I stumbled across a rumor that an ancestor of mine may have been involved in the breeding of enslaved people. I should be clear that I never found any proof of this allegation, but once I knew about this practice, I felt it needed to be explored. I decided to ask myself “What if he had? What would that mean for all involved?”
As a descendent of slaveholders with strong early bonds to those whose ancestors could have been owned by mine, it somehow became my job to weave these differing voices into one story, to put everyone on equal footing.
Q. How did you go about researching the subject and themes for this book?
A. The Birmingham Public Library's Southern Collection has extensive holdings and wonderful archivists who helped me get started. I found primary sources such as runaway slave ads, newspapers and court transcripts particularly helpful, but most of my central material came from visiting slavery-related sites throughout the South.
Q. What do you hope readers will take away from reading your book?
A. I'd like my readers to take away an increased capacity to see and honor someone else's point of view. I'd also like readers to gain a better understanding of how our shared history of slavery continues to shape our shared present.
Q. How do you feel about winning this prize?
A. Growing up in Birmingham, Ala., the place Reverend Shuttlesworth called "the citadel of segregation," taught me that competing truths never want to stand too close to one another. But reading and writing fiction enables us to bring these competing truths together on equal footing, to hold them close until they start to shimmer, until they begin to weave themselves into one whole story that can carry us toward healing. I am moved by the very existence of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and it is deeply heartening to see "Wash" celebrated for the exact reason that compelled me to write it.
Q. What do you love about being a writer?
A. Being a writer is not always easy, but the greatest gift of this vocation may be that it allows you to remain alive to the world in all its richness and complexity. My writing process is my spiritual practice, so I approach the work through meditation and ritual.
Q. What are the biggest challenges of being a writer?
A. Being a writer lets you have more than one life, for better and worse. Being a writer also means that you have to become porous enough to travel into other worlds, other points of view, other realities. But being this porous can make navigating the regular world pretty challenging. It does take some work to find the right balance between being introverted enough to enjoy the solitude of the writing life and being extroverted enough to enjoy taking your book out into the world.
2014 Runner-Up for Non-Fiction: “Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe” by Jo Roberts
Drawing on extensive original interview material, Canadian journalist Jo Roberts vividly examines how their tangled histories of suffering inform Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli lives today and frame the possibilities for peace in Israel.
Q. What inspired you to write this book?
A. I first went to Israel in 2006, when I volunteered as a human rights observer in the rural West Bank. While I was in Tel Aviv, I met some members of Zochrot, a small, very counter-cultural Jewish-Israeli NGO that gives voice to the Palestinian history of the 1948 War and its aftermath. For most Jewish Israelis, the 1948 War was their War of Independence, which finally gave them a state of their own after many centuries of persecution. For Palestinian Israelis, it was the Nakba, "Catastrophe," during which some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the land that became Israel, losing their homes, their land and their whole way of life. The tension between these divergent narratives fascinated me. I wanted to explore how these tangled histories of suffering impact the lives of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis today.
Q. How did you go about researching the subject and themes for this book?
A. I began exploring these themes in my MA thesis. Afterward, I continued my research, and then returned to Israel so I could talk to as many people as possible. I interviewed historians, journalists and activists; community leaders and government officials; diplomats and politicians; Palestinian Israelis displaced during the Nakba and Jewish Israelis who fought in the 1948 War; and Jewish-Israeli residents of former Arab villages.
Q. What do you hope readers will take away from reading your book?
A. "My hope would be that a reader would gain what I gained from researching and writing the book: a deeper understanding of what drives the conflict, and thus a deeper compassion for people on both sides who are caught in it.
Q. How do you feel about winning this prize?
A. Central to my book is the belief that the difficult work of understanding and acknowledging the wounds of each other's collective memory is critical to any genuine reconciliation and peace. I feel that this prize honors those who choose to undertake this challenging and often painful work, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere.
Q. What do you love about being a writer?
A. Writing and researching a topic that I feel passionate about is deeply fulfilling for me — there's nothing like it!
Q. What are the biggest challenges of being a writer?
A. For me personally, the biggest challenges are financial. I'd dearly love to write another book, but it's not easy for writers to make ends meet. I lived off my savings for much of the time I spent writing this book, even though I was fortunate to receive money from several granting bodies.
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