Dayton Literary Peace Prizes honor wartime Ukraine novel and book on history of Charleston church

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NEW YORK (AP) — A coming-of-age novel set in wartime Ukraine and the history of a Black church in South Carolina through slavery, the Civil Rights Movement and a gunman's killings in 2015 are this year's winners of Dayton Literary Peace Prizes.

The Dayton Foundation previously announced that “Bel Canto” novelist Ann Patchett would receive a lifetime achievement award.

Judges awarded the fiction prize to Sam Wachman's “The Sunflower Boys,” a debut book in which two brothers are forced to look after themselves after the Russians bomb their home. Kevin Sack's “Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church” won for nonfiction.

The winners in fiction and nonfiction will each receive $10,000. The runners-up — Charlotte McConaghy's “Wild Dark Shore” and Eve L. Ewing's “Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism” — will get $5,000 apiece.

“Year after year, our community and judges seek out and find four extraordinarily powerful books that center a story that promotes peace and understanding in a world where those ideals continue to feel more foreign with each passing year,” Foundation Executive Director Nicholas A. Raines said in a statement released Thursday. “These four books each offer something unique to readers that we hope will continue to inspire and teach for many years to come.”

The Dayton awards were established in 2006 with a mission to honor “writers whose work uses the power of the written word to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding.” Previous winners include Ta-Nehisi Coates,Alice Hoffman and Junot Diaz.