November 8th, 2025 — Civitella Ranieri congratulates Kaveh Akbar (CRF 2021) and Salman Rushdie (DG 2022) on receiving the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for 2025. The award, in its 20th year, recognizes writers whose work, in fiction or nonfiction, fosters peace, social justice, and global understanding through the power of storytelling.
Kaveh receives the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction for his novel Martyr! and was praised by the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation for the book’s exploration of faith, identity, and belonging amid the complexities of contemporary life. The book is a debut novel that follows Cyrus Shams, a queer Iranian-American poet dealing with grief and addiction.
In response to winning the award, Kaveh said,
“To fully apprehend and act against the myriad atrocities we, as a species, levy on each other, first we must be able to perceive the vital and complex humanity of the harmed. Stories help. It is a privilege to be recognized by a prize that understands peace as art’s ultimate horizon.”
Salman is honored with the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, the lifetime achievement honor of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Salman, who has long championed freedom of expression and cross-cultural dialogue, was honored for a body of work that “shows us what life looks like from another point of view.” This comes on the heels of the publication of his most recent novel, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories, his first work of fiction since the assassination attempt made against him in August of 2022. Salman was interviewed on stage by two time Pulizter-Prize winning foreign correspondent and author David S. Rohde on Saturday, November 8th as part of the award festivities which took place across the weekend.
When informed of his award win, Salman said,
“In this time of war abroad and turmoil at home, it feels more important than ever to speak of peace. I’m grateful for this opportunity to celebrate the beauty and urgent necessity of peace, and to remember that art is always in the service of that cause.”
Presented annually in Dayton, Ohio, the Literary Peace Prize has been previously awarded to authors like Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, John Irving, Gloria Steinem, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The awards are named for the site where the negotiations for the Dayton Peace Accords took place in 1995 that ended a war in the Balkans marked by ethnic cleansing that killed more than 300,000 people and displaced one million. The Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award is named for the American diplomat who was an architect of the Accords.
We are proud to celebrate the recognition of these writers whose imagination and courage continue to inspire readers and foster peace around the world.