Marilynne Robinson Will Receive the 2016 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

Posted on August 25, 2016

Author Marilynne Robinson will be the recipient of the 2016 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. The award is one of several which is awarded by the Dayton Literary Peace Prize organization. The award is named after Richard C. Holbrooke, the diplomat who helped negotiate the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords which ended the war in Bosnia.

The award is given to a write whose work fosters social justice, peace and global understanding. The author's entire body of work is considered when the jury awards the prize. It is the only international peace awarded given by an American organization.

A novelist, essayist and nonfiction author, Dr. Robinson is best known for her Gilead trilogy of novels. Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She also won the 2009 Orange Prize for Home and the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Lila. Her nonfiction essays collections include Mother Country, The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, and The Death of Adam.

President Barack Obama awarded Dr. Robinson the 2012 National Humanities Medal "for her grace and intelligence in writing" and for her "moral strength and lyrical clarity." Ms. Robinson lives in Iowa City and teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Sharon Rab, founder and co-chair of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, had this to say about Ms. Robinson: "In her fiction and in her essays, Marilynne Robinson is concerned with the issues that define the Dayton Literary Peace Prize: forgiveness, the sacredness of the human creature, and delight in being alive and experiencing the natural world. She praised her "luminous, deeply moving prose."