Today, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, which celebrates “writers whose work demonstrates the power of the written word to foster peace,” announced the winners of the 2026 Dayton Literary Peace Prize (for books published in 2025).
For fiction, the winner is The Sunflower Boys by Sam Wachman; the runner-up is Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore.
The nonfiction winner is Kevin Sack’s Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church; the runner-up is Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve L. Ewing.
The winners will each receive a $10,000 cash award, and the runners-up will take home $5,000.
As was previously announced, Ann Patchett has also been named as this year’s recipient of the Foundation’s 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.”
