Aspen Words will confer the inaugural $35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize this year, recognizing a work of fiction with social impact. Twenty nominees are still in the running, and the diverse list includes 12 novels and eight short story collections covering a variety of critical issues and published by an array of presses.

Vaddey Ratner’s Music of the Ghosts follows Teera, who escapes the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia as a child only to return decades later to meet a man who claims to have known her father in prison. The story is a personal one — Ratner herself survived the Khmer Rouge. Her debut novel, In the Shadow of the Banyan, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for both the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2013 Indies Choice Book of the Year.

Aspen Institute: How might fiction help us to explore contemporary issues?

Ratner: More than 35 years ago, I arrived in the U.S. as a child refugee of war.  From a huge extended family, only my mother and I escaped together, eventually resettling to Missouri. Today the world’s attention is focused on refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, northern Africa, and now Myanmar. This mass movement of people elicits a wide range of response — compassion and kindness but also fear and hatred.

I’ve seen where the rhetoric of fear and hatred can lead. I know in my bones that, under certain conditions, we all have the potential to inflict violence, to perpetuate it. So, how we react in the wake of chaos, in the wake of profound suffering, is so important, not just for the victims and survivors of violence, but ultimately for all of us, for our human society as a whole.

Read the full interview with author Vaddey Ratner about her novel, Music of the Ghosts, at The Aspen Institute.