As usual with us, we have good news to share(it’s becoming the norm these days!). Our dear Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus, Half Of A Yellow Sun, The Thing Around Your Neck, winner of the Orange Broadband Prize, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize,(we could go on but the accolades are just so many!) has been named as one of the finalists for the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She was named on the 1st of September, 2010 alongside veteran writer, Chinua Achebe and ten others for her book, The Thing Around Your Neck.
Inspired by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States. The Prize celebrates the power of literature to promote peace, nonviolent conflict resolution, and global understanding.
The shortlist includes works by best-selling authors (Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, Stones Into Schools by Greg Mortenson), first-time novelists (The Calligrapher’s Daughterby Eugenia Kim), and Booker Prize-winning authors (The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe)
The 2010 finalists also explore a diverse range of challenging issues ranging from cultural dislocation (A Good Fall by Ha Jin) to famine (Enough: Why the World’s Poor Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman) to the impact of war crimes and mass murder (Tears in the Darkness by Michael and Elizabeth Norman, A Postcard from the Volcano by Lucy Beckett) and are set in locations around the world, including Nigeria (The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Adiche), Jamaica (The Book of Night Women by Marlon James), Kashmir (In the Valley of the Mist by Justine Hardy), and Ethiopia (Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese).
A winner and runner-up in fiction and nonfiction will be announced on September 22nd. Winners receive a $10,000 honorarium and runners-up receive $1,000.00. They will be honored at a gala ceremony hosted by award-winning journalist, Nick Clooney, in Dayton on Sunday, November 7th.
