Professor Bennoune Named as Finalist for Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Professor Karima Bennoune has been named as a finalist for the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in nonfiction for her acclaimed book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism.
The book, which is the product of interviews with nearly 300 people of Muslim heritage in 30 countries, chronicles the stories of individuals who have opposed the rise of fundamentalism, extremism, and terrorism in Muslim-majority countries. Published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2013, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here has received widespread praise from publications including Publisher's Weekly, The Economist, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among others, and was selected by the editors of Booklist, a publication of the American Library Association, as one of the best books of 2013. Recently, a TED talk by Professor Bennoune in which she discusses the book garnered nearly one million views on TED.com.
Inspired by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States. The Prize celebrates the power of literature to promote peace, social justice, and global understanding. A winner and runner-up in fiction and nonfiction will be announced on September 24th. They will be honored at a gala ceremony hosted by award-winning journalist Nick Clooney in Dayton, Ohio on Sunday, November 9th.
Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. She joined the King Hall faculty from Rutgers School of Law-Newark in 2012.
2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalists