Professor Bennoune Wins Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Professor Karima Bennoune has been named as the 2014 winner of the prestigious Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction. Professor Bennoune was honored for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism. 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.
Professor Bennoune's 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 more than one million views on TED.com.
Professor Bennoune will be honored alongside Bob Shacochis, whose The Woman Who Lost Her Soul won the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace prize for fiction. The authors will receive their awards at a ceremony hosted by award-winning journalist Nick Clooney on November 9 in Dayton, Ohio.
"In both clear and subtle ways, each of this year's winners reveal how present struggles -- from the war on terror to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to racial inequality in America -- are rooted in tangled histories and past injustices that must be acknowledged and resolved in order to achieve lasting peace," said Sharon Rab, founder and co-chair of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation.
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.