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)
