American novelist Ann Patchett to receive the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award for her career ‘reminding us that literature is a necessity.’

By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox

“If you wait to find a way to bring peace to the world there’s a good chance that nothing will be accomplished,” said American novelist Ann Patchett when she was informed that she would be the recipient of the 2026 Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Founded in 2006, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the first and only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States. Each year, the prize is awarded to one fiction and one nonfiction author, and one fiction and one nonfiction runner-up, whose work advances peace as a solution to conflict and leads readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view.

Last month, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation announced the finalists for this year’s prize, which honors books published in 2025. The winners each receive a $10,000 cash prize, and the first runners-up receive a $5,000 cash prize.

The finalists for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for publishing year 2025 are:

Nonfiction finalists:

• By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine by Danielle Leavitt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Free: My Search for Meaning by Amanda Knox (Grand Central Publishing)
• Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack (Crown)
• Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve L. Ewing (One World)
• The Jailhouse Lawyer by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull (Penguin Press)
• The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice by Jack Fairweather (Crown)

 Fiction finalists:

• Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen (Knopf)
• Outside Women by Roohi Choudhry (University Press of Kentucky)
• The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)
• The Sunflower Boys by Sam Wachman (Harper Collins)
• Too Soon by Betty Shamieh (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
• Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron Books)

In addition to the finalists, the Foundation announced Patchett as this year’s distinguished honoree whose body of work reflects the Prize’s mission of fostering peace, social justice, and global understanding.

Patchett is the author of numerous award-winning and critically acclaimed novels, most recently, Whistler, which was published last month in the United States. Patchett’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Time magazine named Patchett one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World and U.S. President Joe Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture.

“Ann Patchett has spent her career reminding us that literature is a necessity—it is the very medium through which we understand one another. Her novels return, again and again, to the questions that animate this prize: How do we build community across difference? How do we forgive? How do we repair what has been broken?,” said Nicholas A. Raines, Executive Director of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation.

“At a moment when those questions feel more urgent than ever, honoring Ann Patchett with the Holbrooke Award is an act of faith in the power of storytelling to encourage empathy, foster human connection, and lead us toward a more humane world.”

Winners of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize will be announced in September with an award ceremony to take place in Dayton, Ohio the weekend of November 7-8, 2026.