The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Committee announced two winners of the prestigious prize with a $10,000 honorarium. Richard Bausch won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction. Benjamin Skinner won the nonfiction prize for his book, “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern Day Slavery.”
According to the release, Skinner will donate his $10,000 honorarium to Free The Slaves, the the U.S. arm of the human rights group, Anti-Slavery International. Thomas Friedman was named the nonfiction runner up for “Hot, Flat and Crowded.”
The prize announcement opened with a nod to the fiction runner-up, a new literary celebrity: “On the heels of being selected as the next book for Oprah’s Book Club, “Say You’re One of Them” by Uwem Akpan today was named the runner-up for fiction for the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the only literary peace awarded in the U.S.”