Ta-Nehisi Coates Wins Dayton Literary Peace Prize

(Penguin Random House via AP)

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — A debut novel about a displaced Palestinian family and a book of essays exploring race and identity during Barack Obama’s presidency have been named the winners of the annual Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

The judges named Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power as its 2018 winners. The Dayton Daily News reports the award offers $10,000 in cash to one fiction and one nonfiction author whose works advance “peace as a solution to conflict.”

Books qualifying for the awards had to be published or translated into English in 2017 and must address peace.

The novel Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and the memoir Reading With Patrick by Michelle Kuo were runners-up in the fiction and nonfiction categories, respectively.

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