The Dictator’s Shadow: Life under Pinochet, a memoir of dictatorship and exile and their long aftermath in Chile, has won the 2009 WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

The author of the winning book, Heraldo Muñoz, will receive a $1,000 cash award and an invitation to receive the prize at WOLA’s headquarters later this year, as well as an invitation to give a reading at Duke.

WOLA, the human rights research and advocacy group established in 1974, and Duke University created the prize to honor the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy and social justice in contemporary Latin America.

Muñoz’s book, published by Perseus Books, explores Augusto Pinochet’s legacy of violence and corruption from a uniquely personal perspective. The author, currently Chile’s ambassador to the United Nations, was imprisoned and exiled by the Pinochet regime because of his political views and, in this poignant and wide-ranging memoir, recounts how Chileans brought the former dictator to account for some of his crimes.