Novelist, essayist gets 2016 Holbrooke award
Bestseller honored for ‘graceful and thoughtful’ writing.
The 2016 Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award will be given to writer Marilynne Robinson at this year’s Dayton Literary Peace Prize event on Nov. 20.
The prize, which honors a writer’s entire body of work, includes a Michael Bashaw sculpture and the monetary award of $10,000.
The bestselling novelist and essayist is being honored for work that offers “moving, graceful and thoughtful meditations on modern life, spirituality, science and politics.”
A native of Idaho, Robinson earned acclaim with her 1980 debut novel, “Housekeeping,” a story about two sisters that explored universal themes of family and home. Twenty-five years later, she produced her award-winning Gilead trilogy — three novels exploring the concept of spiritual grace against the backdrop of a mythical Iowa town.
Her nonfiction books include the essay collections “The Givenness of Things,” “When I Was a Child I Read Books,” “Absence of Mind” and “The Death of Adam,” as well as the environmental wake-up call “Mother Country,” which was a 1989 National Book Award Finalist for nonfiction.
In 2012, President Barack Obama, a selfavowed fan of her work, awarded Robinson the National Humanities Medal.
Among the previous winners of the award are Studs Terkel, Elie Wiesel, Gloria Steinem, Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver. Finalists for the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize will be announced on Sept. 13.
This year’s awards cere- mony will begin at 5 p.m. Nov. 20 at the Schuster Performing Arts Center in Dayton.
For more information, go to www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org.