Today, Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundationwhich “celebrates writers whose work demonstrates the power of the written word to promote peace,” announced the finalists for its 2026 Dayton Literary Peace Prize (for books published in 2025). Each winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize, and the first runner-up will receive a $5,000 cash prize.
Here are the finalists for the Literary Peace Prize:
Nonfiction:
Danielle Levitt, Until the Second Spring: Seven Lives and a Year of War in Ukraine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Amanda Knox, FREE: My Search for Meaning (Grand Central Publishing)
Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (Crown)
Eve L. Ewing, Original Sin: The (Mis)Education of Black and Native Children and the Creation of American Racism (one world)
Kelvin Duncan and Sophie Kall, jailhouse lawyer (Penguin Press)
Jack Fairweather, Prosecutor: One man’s fight to bring Nazis to justice (Crown)
Imagination:
bad bad girl (knopf)
Ruhi Chaudhary, women outside (University of Kentucky Press)
Karen Russell, antidote (knopf)
Sam Watchman, sunflower boys (HarperCollins)
betty shamih, Very early (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
Charlotte McConaughey, wild dark edge (Flatiron Books)
The winners of the 2026 Dayton Literary Peace Prize will be announced in September.
