Winners of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize 2020 Announced

No matter how crazy the year 2020 was, the annual literary awards season is pretty much alive and kicking. Following the trend, the winners of Dayton Literary Peace Prize 2020 have also been declared. Legendary Canadian writer Margaret Atwood won The Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguish Achievement Award for this year. Alice Hoffman and Chanel Miller won the 2020 Award for Fiction and Non-Fiction respectively.

Margaret Atwood is one of the greatest authors of the modern era and the recipient of several national and international literary awards. Atwood is a two-time Booker Prize winner, with about 50 published works to her name.

2020 DLPP Fiction

Alice Hoffman is an American novelist, known for Practical Magic (1995), a novel that was adapted into a film of the same name. Hoffman’s been selected as the winner of the 2020 DLPP Fiction for her novel The World That We Knew. The novel set in Germany of the 1940s, arguably the darkest decade of the 20^th century, and the Holocaust. Commenting on her selection as the winner for the 2020 DLPP Fiction, she said

“It is a great honor to be selected as the winner of the Dayton Peace Prize for my novel The World That We Knew, a book that explores what it means to be human in an inhuman time. Literature’s greatest gift is that it allows readers, and writers, to imagine ourselves living other lives, as other souls, in situations that challenge who we are and allow us to think about living a moral life.”

2020 DLPP Non-Fiction

The 2020 DLPP Non-Fiction winner, Chanel Miller, is a young American writer. Her selected work, Know My Name, is a memoir that documents her tragic experience of being sexually assaulted on the campus of the esteemed Stanford University in 2015. It started a revolution in the US, exposing the mishandling of sexual assault cases, and mistreatment of the victims. On being selected as the 2020 DLPP Non-Fiction, Miller said,

“…And there is a girl out there, who may be feeling as suffocated or hidden as I once was. Late at night, she’ll take out my book, and we’ll talk about the hardest parts, lay bare our buried feelings, and nobody can touch that space, and that to me is peace.”

Christy Lefteri (The Beekeeper of Aleppo), and Jennifer Eberhardt (Biased) were the runners-up for DLPP Fiction and Non-Fiction respectively.

About the DLPP Awards

The DLPP award was established in 2006 and is currently in its 15^th edition. It is the only literary award in the United States that recognizes the power of written words in promoting peace. The award is given in three categories – Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Lifetime Achievement. Each of the winners is awarded prize money of $10,000. The Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguish Achievement Award was formerly known as the Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed by the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (DLPP) Foundation. It was renamed in honor of Richard Holbrooke, the US Ambassador to Germany and a board member of the DLPP Foundation, following his tragic death in 2015.