Irish novelist awarded Holbrooke honor
Presentation set at Dayton Literary Peace Prize gala.
Colm Tóibín, an Irish novelist, journalist and essayist, is the recipient of the 2017 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize committee announced Thursday.
The award, given for lifetime achievement, celebrates the power of literature to foster peace, social justice and global understanding, according to the organization. It is named for the late U.S. diplomat who brokered the 1995 Bosnia peace accords signed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Toibin’s wide range of work has drawn from his native Ireland, his life as a gay man and his travels as an international journalist.
Among his novels are “The Master,” depicting the life of the famed writer Henry James; “Brooklyn,” a coming-of-age story about an Irish immigrant later made into an Oscar-nominated film, and the recent “House of Names,” his reimagining of a Greek tragedy.
Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation co-chair Sharon Rab said Toibin’s writings “remind us of shared humanity and the possibility of reconciliation or simply of understanding, which are the first steps to making peace.”
“Our (writers’) aim is to reach the reader’s imagination, have an effect on the nervous systems of other people,” Toibin, 62, said in a statement in response to winning the award.
“Good sentences offer us a way to imagine life in all its strangeness and ambiguity and possibility, alert us to the power of the imagination to transform and transcend our nature, offer us a blueprint not only for who we are but for who we might be, who we might become,” he said.
Previous winners include Studs Terkel, Taylor Branch, Gloria Steinem and Elie Wiesel.
Tóibín will be officially presented with the award and a monetary prize of $10,000 on Nov. 5 at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Gala at Dayton’s Schuster Performing Arts Center.
Finalists for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction and nonfiction will be announced Sept. 13.