Dayton Literary Peace Prize 2025: Salman Rushdie Wins Distinguished Achievement Award & MARTYR! Wins Fiction Award
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the first and only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace. Prize nominations include adult fiction and nonfiction books published within the past year that have led readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view. The fiction and nonfiction winners receive a $10,000 cash prize, and the runner-ups each receive a $5,000 cash prize.
We’re honored to share that Penguin Random House author Salman Rushdie was recognized with the top honor, the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement award, and Kaveh Akbar’s MARTYR won the Fiction Award!
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation will honor this year’s winners and runners-up at an awards ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, on the weekend of November 8 and 9, 2025. On that Saturday, Salman Rushdie will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David S. Rohde. On Sunday, Joshua Carter, grandson of the late President Jimmy Carter and last year’s Holbrooke Award recipient , will present the citation at the ceremony.
Learn more about our winners and runner-ups below.
© Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award
Salman Rushdie is the author of fifteen previous novels, including MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN, SHAME, THE SATANIC VERSES, THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH, and QUICHOTTE, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America and the recipient of the PEN Centenary Courage Award. His books have been translated into over forty languages.
Fiction Award
MARTYR by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage)
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
We’d also like to honor the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize runner-ups!
BLACK BUTTERFLIES by Priscilla Morris (Vintage)
When violence erupts and becomes, finally, unavoidable, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety in England. She stays behind, reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a few weeks. As the city falls under siege, everything she loves about her home is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops. Yet Zora and her friends find ways to rebuild themselves, over and over. Told with breathtaking immediacy, this is a story of disintegration, resilience, and hope—a stirring debut from a commanding new voice.
A MAP OF FUTURE RUINS: On Borders and Belonging by Lauren Markham (Riverhead Books)
When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West’s idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today?
In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not activists, not the country’s growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime.