Book News: A Prize In Memory Of Peace Picks Its Winners

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner Bob Shacochis peers deeply into the camera at the 2013 Texas Book Festival.

Larry D. Moore/Wikimedia Commons

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize this year will be going to Bob Shacochis, for fiction, and Karima Bennoune, for nonfiction. The international award, which brings with it a $10,000 purse per winner, recognizes writers "whose work uses the power of literature to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding," according to the group's press release.

Just under a decade old, the prize is a fairly new one. But it finds its ballast in a landmark act of peace — the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the Bosnian War in 1995. Winners will be recognized in a November ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, where the original peace deal was negotiated.

Shacochis won for The Woman Who Lost Her Soul and Bennoune for Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here; they join novelist Louise Erdrich, who earlier this year won the group's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, named in honor of the American diplomat who brokered the accords.

So Long, Mr. Miller: Karl Miller, a founding editor of the London Review of Books, has died at the age of 83. Miller co-founded the publication in 1979, long editing and supporting the likes of Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, but he was also a professor and prize-winning author himself. As Andrew O'Hagan, his former colleague at the LRB, told The Guardian, "He changed the picture for nearly five decades of writers and readers."

Hi-Fi Haiku: The record label behind Nirvana, Soundgarden and, more recently, The Shins is getting bookish on us. This week, Seattle-based Sub Pop released a book of haiku by Danny Bland, paired with photos from Greg Dulli and calligraphy by Exene Cervenka. And Sub Pop's pedigree is fitting — Bland's three-line nuggets, like this one, would have felt right at home in the heyday of grunge:

"in the melee of

blackout-curtained misconduct

you belong to me"

Lines In Falling Leaves: Before you don that sweater, handpick a decorative gourd or opine about pumpkin spice on Twitter, please, take a moment to put on some poetry. U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright — whose voice may as well be a warm hearth — dropped by All Things Considered on Thursday afternoon to read his autumn-quiet poem, "Ancient of Days." Listen, and breathe just a bit deeper before the fall.