Today, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, which celebrates “writers whose work demonstrates the power of the written word to foster peace,” announced the finalists for its 2026 Dayton Literary Peace Prize (for books published in 2025). The winners will each receive a $10,000 cash award, and the first runners-up will take home $5,000.
The Foundation also announced today that Ann Patchett will receive their Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, which is “bestowed upon a writer whose body of work reflects the Prize’s mission of fostering peace, social justice, and global understanding.”
Here are the Literary Peace Prize finalists:
NONFICTION:
Danielle Leavitt, By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Amanda Knox, Free: My Search for Meaning (Grand Central Publishing)
Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (Crown)
Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism (One World)
Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull, The Jailhouse Lawyer (Penguin Press)
Jack Fairweather, The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice (Crown)
FICTION:
Gish Jen, Bad Bad Girl (Knopf)
Roohi Choudhry, Outside Women (University Press of Kentucky)
Karen Russell, The Antidote (Knopf)
Sam Wachman, The Sunflower Boys (Harper Collins)
Betty Shamieh, Too Soon (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore (Flatiron Books)
The winners of the of the 2026 Dayton Literary Peace Prize will be announced in September.
