By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Winners To Be Named in September
The 2025 shortlists announced by the Dayton Literary Peace Prize reveal a curious coincidence: this competition, like the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the United Arab Emirates is observing its 20th anniversary. Also like the Zayed Award, the Dayton program draws from an international pool of writings.
Unlike the Zayed Award, however, the Dayton program continues to fly below the radar of general visibility in the teeming plethora of book and publishing awards.
As you may recall, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s name comes from the Dayton Peace Accords, the framework for the negotiated pact for Bosnia and Herzegovina, an agreement finalized in 1995 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which lies east of Dayton. The literary award program was created in 2006 as a cultural complement to the Dayton Accords’ accomplishment.
In the shortlists made public Monday (July 14), for the 2025 cycle, there are two categories, fiction and nonfiction, in which the award is given annually. The winner in each is to receive US$10,000. A first runner up in each category gets $5,000. Winners in those two categories and a Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award are to be named in September, with an awards weekend set for November 8 and 9 in Dayton, Ohio.
The stated goal is to reward writers “whose work uses the power of the written word to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding.” What’s being sought in this program is literary work that “advances peace as a solution to conflict, leading readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view.” Last year’s fiction prize winner was Paul Lynch for Prophet Song originally published by Juliet Mabey‘s Oneworld Publications—for which Lynch won London’s 2023 Booker Prize for Fiction—a fine exemplar of the Dayton mission.
Our international readership will recognize that there are similarities of intent here with the Aspen Words Literary Prize, which is awarded “to an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.” Both of these award programs are serious in their intent and focused on socially meaningful work.
Dayton Literary Peace Prize 2025 Fiction Shortlist
- Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris (Penguin Random House / Knopf)
- James by Percival Everett (Penguin Random House / Doubleday)
- Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Penguin Random House / Knopf)
- Freedom Is a Feast by Alejandro Puyana (Hachette Book Group / Little, Brown)
- The Women by Kristin Hannah (Macmillan / St. Martin’s Press)
- The Good Deed by Helen Benedict (Red Hen Press)
Dayton Literary Peace Prize 2025 Nonfiction Shortlist
- The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years by Sunil Amrith (WW Norton / Liveright)
- John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg (Simon & Schuster)
- Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor (Penguin Random House / Pantheon)
- Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen (Penguin Random House / Dutton)
- A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging by Lauren Markham (Riverhead)
- The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora by Wendy Pearlman (WW Norton / Liveright)
More from Publishing Perspectives on the international industry’s book and publishing awards programs is here, and more on the United States’ market is here .