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Novel, prison memoir win peace honors
Chang-Rae Lee’s novel “The Surrendered” and Wilbert Rideau’s memoir “In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance” have been named the fiction and non-fiction recipients of the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Winners will be honored at 5 p.m. Nov. 13 at the Schuster Center in Dayton during ceremonies hosted by journalist Nick Clooney. Presenters will be 2010 recipients Dave Eggers and Marlon James.
Barbara Kingsolver, author of “The Poisonwood Bible,” “The Lacuna” and “Small Wonder,” will receive the inaugural Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, formerly known as the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Winning writers receive a $10,000 honorarium. Runners up, who receive $1,000, were “Beneath the Lion’s Gaze,” by Maaza Mengiste, and “The Warmth of Other Suns,” by Isabel Wilkerson.
Inspired by the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, which ended the war in Bosnia, the award is the only international literary peace price given in the United States. It celebrates the ability of literature to promote peace, nonviolent resolution and global understanding.
Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Lee’s “The Surrendered” examines the Korean War’s lasting psychological wounds for a former orphan and an American GI who continue to cross paths.
Rideau, whose death sentence was reduced to life in Louisiana’s Angola Prison, writes about his experiences as a crusading journalist and editor of the penitentiary’s newsmagazine.
“While this year’s winners demonstrate how much individual lives are at the mercy of larger political currents around them, they also remind us that we each have the opportunity - and responsibility - to shape a better world,” said Sharon Rab, chair of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation.
The foundation will also present Nigel Young with a special award for scholarship for his role as editor of The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace.
The awards ceremonies are open to the public. Ticket details will be forthcoming. For more information, go to www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org.
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