In 2014 the awards were dominated by women writers. Both the non-fiction winning book and the runner-up, as well as the fiction runner-up, were written by women. And all three works by women were their authors’ first published books. Margaret Wrinkle was runner-up for fiction; Jo Roberts for nonfiction. Winner of the award for fiction was Bob Shacochis; Karima Bennoune won in the nonfiction category. Louise Erdrich was the 2014 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award recipient. Click on the honoree’s name for video of acceptance speech, if available.
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Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism
Karima Bennoune
In Lahore, Pakistan, Faizan Peerzada resisted being relegated to a “dark corner” by staging a performing arts festival despite bomb attacks. In Senegal, wheelchair-bound Aissatou Cissé produced a comic book to illustrate the injustices faced by disabled women and girls. In Algeria, publisher Omar Belhouchet and his journalists struggled to put out their paper, El Watan (The Nation), the same night that a 1996 jihadist bombing devastated their offices and killed eighteen of their colleagues. In Afghanistan, Young Women for Change took to the streets of Kabul to denounce sexual harassment, undeterred by threats. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, Abdirizak Bihi organized a Ramadan basketball tournament among Somali refugees to counter the influence of Al Shabaab. From Karachi to Tunis, Kabul to Tehran, across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and beyond, these trailblazers often risked death to combat the rising tide of fundamentalism within their own countries.
But this global community of writers, artists, doctors, musicians, museum curators, lawyers, activists, and educators of Muslim heritage remains largely invisible, lost amid the heated coverage of Islamist terror attacks on one side and abuses perpetrated against suspected terrorists on the other.
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Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel's Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe
Jo Roberts
1948: As Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust, struggle toward the new State of Israel, Arab refugees are fleeing, many under duress. Sixty years later, the memory of trauma has shaped both peoples' collective understanding of who they are.
After a war, the victors write history. How was the story of the exiled Palestinians erased – from textbooks, maps, even the land? How do Jewish and Palestinian Israelis now engage with the histories of the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe") and the Holocaust, and how do these echo through the political and physical landscapes of their country?
Vividly narrated, with extensive original interview material, Contested Land, Contested Memory examines how these tangled histories of suffering inform Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli lives today, and frame Israel's possibilities for peace.
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The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
Bob Shacochis
This novel spans five decades and three continents; it traces a global lineage of political, cultural, and personal tumult from World War II to the present. During a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings, the humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful, seductive photojournalist, Jackie Scott. There he is confronted with a dangerous landscape of poverty, corruption, and voodoo. The story brings to life an intricate portrait of catastrophic events that led up to the war on terror and the America we are today.
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Wash: A Novel
Margaret Wrinkle
When the pressures of early 1800s westward expansion and debt threaten to destroy everything he's built, a troubled Revolutionary War veteran embarks on an audacious plan involving setting one of his male slaves as his breeding sire.