Richard C Holbrooke distinguished achievement award recognises work concerned with ‘forgiveness, the sacredness of the human creature and delight in being alive’

Marilynne Robinson, already recipient of a host of awards honouring her writing for its literary qualities, has now been honoured for fostering “peace, social justice and global understanding” with her novels and essays.

Robinson, author of the award-winning Gilead trilogy, which tells the story of the Iowa pastor John Ames, was named by the Dayton literary peace prize as winner of its Richard C Holbrooke distinguished achievement award. Sharon Rab, founder of the Dayton literary peace prize foundation, praised Robinson’s “luminous, deeply moving prose”, which she said “explores the causes of strife in a family, in a community, and in the world, while ultimately demonstrating the universal healing power of reconciliation and love”.

“In her fiction and in her essays, Marilynne Robinson is concerned with the issues that define the Dayton literary peace prize: forgiveness, the sacredness of the human creature and delight in being alive and experiencing the natural world,” said Rab.

Learning of her win, Robinson said that it was “certainly appropriate that a literary prize should also be a peace prize, and that writers themselves should be made aware of their unique opportunity to speak to an international readership”.

“I have had the privilege of seeing for myself how books live in the world, how readily they can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries, how important they are in sustaining a human conversation through and despite the frictions that arise among nations, how intensely they can be taken to heart anywhere,” said the novelist.

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Winner of awards including the Pulitzer, the Orange and the National Book Critics Circle award in the past, Robinson was awarded the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama in 2012. The medal citation praised how the novelist “represents a remarkable merger of the interests of the public intellectual and the private citizen”, saying that in her “gemlike” novels, “she has used modest heartland settings to unearth universal themes of family and spirit”.

Robinson said at the time that “every subject that I talk about, whether it’s economics or nuclear physics or whatever, it has a very strong ethical dimension … As the future looms before us, I think we can see the ethical seriousness of many kinds of choices becoming more and more apparent.”

Former winners of the Richard C Holbrooke award – which is named after the US diplomat who helped negotiate the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia – include Elie Wiesel, Studs Terkel, Louise Erdrich and Gloria Steinem. Robinson will be presented with the prize on 20 November.