National Book Critics Circle Award



The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote the finest books and reviews published in English.

The main awards fall into six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism. Awards are not given to titles that have been previously published in English, such as re-issues and paperback editions. They also do not "consider cookbooks, self help books (including inspirational literature), reference books, picture books or children's books." Titles are, however, eligible to be awarded if they are "translations, short story and essay collections, self published books, and any titles that fall under the general categories above." The NBCC membership elects a 24 person all volunteer Board of Directors to nominate and judge books for the awards and guide all day-to-day activities.

2010
The 2010 winners were announced March 10, 2011. (winners in bold)

Fiction
 * Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf)
 * Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Farrar, Straus And Giroux)
 * David Grossman, To The End Of The Land (Knopf)
 * Hans Keilson, Comedy In A Minor Key (Farrar, Straus And Giroux)
 * Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (Faber & Faber)

Nonfiction
 * Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Spiegel & Grau)
 * S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American (Scribner)
 * Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (Random )
 * Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner )
 * Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Random)

Criticism
 * Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
 * Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (Harper )
 * 'Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West'' (Yale University Press) '''
 * Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance (University of Chicago Press)
 * Ander Monson, Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf)

Biography
 * Sarah Bakewell, How To Live, Or A Life Of Montaigne (Other Press)
 * Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives Of Somerset Maugham: A Biography (Random House)
 * Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story Of The Honorable Detective And His Rendezvous With American History (Norton)
 * Thomas Powers, The Killing Of Crazy Horse (Knopf)
 * Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Lives And Legends (Doubleday)

Autobiography
 * Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 (Scribner)
 * David Dow, The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve)
 * Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (Twelve)
 * Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Hiroshima in the Morning (Feminst Press)
 * Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco)
 * Darin Strauss, Half a Life (McSweeney’s)

'''  Poetry'''
 * Anne Carson, Nox (New Directions)
 * Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)
 * Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Penguin Poets)
 * Kay Ryan, The Best of It (Grove)
 * C.D. Wright, One With Others (Copper Canyon)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
 * Sarah L. Courteau
 * William Deresiewicz
 * Ruth Franklin
 * Kathryn Harrison
 * Parul Sehgal

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
 * Dalky Archive Press

2009
The 2009 winners were announced March 11, 2010 (winners in bold)

Fiction
 * Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
 * Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
 * Michelle Huneven, Blame (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG)
 * Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)
 * Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)

General nonfiction
 * Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press)
 * Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)
 * Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon)
 * Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remain (Random House)
 * William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking)

Criticism
 * Eula Biss, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press)
 * Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf Press)
 * Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)
 * David Hajdu, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo Press)
 * Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber)

Biography
 * Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Knopf)
 * Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown)
 * Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press)
 * Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
 * Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)

Autobiography
 * Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)
 * Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
 * Mary Karr, Lit (Harper)
 * Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
 * Edmund White, City Boy ( Bloomsbury)

Poetry
 * Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)
 * Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
 * D. A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)
 * Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
 * Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
 * Joan Acocella
 * Michael Antman
 * William Deresiewicz
 * Donna Seaman
 * Wendy Smith

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
 * Joyce Carol Oates

2008
The 2008 winners were announced March 12, 2009 (winners in bold).

Fiction
 * Roberto Bolaño, 2666. (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
 * Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project, (Riverhead)
 * Marilynne Robinson, Home, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
 * Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge, (Random House)
 * M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, (West Virginia University Press)

General nonfiction
 * Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, (Knopf)
 * Dexter Filkins, The Forever War, (Knopf)
 * George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776. (Oxford University Press)
 * Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, (Atlantic)
 * Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, (Doubleday)

Autobiography
 * Rick Bass, Why I Came West, (Houghton Mifflin)
 * Helene Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach, (Simon and Schuster)
 * Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter, (W.W. Norton)
 * Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven, (Harmony Books)
 * Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, (Algonquin)

Biography
 * Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century, (Penguin Press)
 * Patrick French, The World is What it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul, (Knopf)
 * Paul J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, (Amistad)
 * Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, (Norton)
 * Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson, (Knopf)

Poetry
 * Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light, (University of Arizona Press)
 * Devin Johnston, Sources, (Turtle Point Press)
 * August Kleinzahler, Sleeping it Off in Rapid City, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
 * Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery), The Landscapist, (Sheep Meadow Press)
 * Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar, (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism
 * Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, (Metropolitan Books)
 * Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life. (Boston Review/MIT)
 * Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One Of Civilization’s Greatest Minds, (Doubleday)
 * Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter, (University of Chicago Press)
 * Reginald Shepard, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, (University of Michigan Press)

The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
 * Michael Antman
 * Ron Charles
 * Kathryn Harrison
 * Laila Lalami
 * Todd Shy

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
 * PEN American Center

2007
The 2007 award winners (bold) were announced on March 6, 2008.

Fiction
 * Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
 * Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
 * Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (Dial Press)
 * Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger's Daughter (Ecco)
 * Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon and Schuster)

General nonfiction
 * Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism (Hill & Wang)
 * Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press)
 * Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)
 * Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (Doubleday)
 * Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne BKs/St. Martin’s)

Autobiography
 * Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
 * Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf)
 * Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco)
 * Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
 * Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia (Random House)

Biography
 * Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)
 * Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (Knopf)
 * Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison (Knopf)
 * John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932 (Knopf)
 * Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (Penguin Press)

Poetry
 * Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)
 * Matthea Harvey, Modern Life (Graywolf)
 * Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking (Flood)
 * Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood)
 * Tadeusz Różewicz, New Poems (Archipelago)

Criticism
 * Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon)
 * Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quniceanera (Viking)
 * Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream (Metropolitan/Holt)
 * Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
 * Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
 * Brooke Allen
 * Sam Anderson, book critic for New York magazine
 * Ron Charles
 * Walter Kirn
 * Adam Kirsch

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
 * Emilie Buchwald, writer, editor, and founding publisher of Milkweed Editions, in Minneapolis.

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
This award has also been presented as the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publishing and the Ivan Sandrof Award, Contribution to American Arts & Letters.
 * 2010: Dalky Archive Press
 * 2009: Joyce Carol Oates
 * 2008: PEN American Center
 * 2007: Emilie Buchwald, co-founder of the Milkweed Editions publishing house
 * 2006: John Leonard
 * 2005: Bill Henderson, founder of Pushcart Press
 * 2004: Louis D. Rubin, Jr., founder of Algonquin Press and the author and editor of more than 50 books
 * 2003: Studs Terkel
 * 2002: Richard Howard
 * 2001: Jason Epstein
 * 2000: Barney Rosset
 * 1999: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Pauline Kael
 * 1998:
 * 1997: Leslie Fiedler
 * 1996: Albert Murray
 * 1995: Alfred Kazin and Elizabeth Hardwick
 * 1994: William Maxwell
 * 1993:
 * 1992:
 * 1991:
 * 1990: Donald Keene
 * 1989: James Laughlin
 * 1988:
 * 1987: Robert Giroux
 * 1986:
 * 1985:
 * 1984: The Library of America
 * 1983:
 * 1982: Leslie A. Marchand
 * 1981:

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
This citation is awarded annually. It honors Nona Balakian, who was a founding member of the National Book Critics Circle. For 43 years, Balakian was an editor on the staff of the New York Times Book Review. Five finalists are announced each year, one of whom is selected as the winner of the citation. The award has been called "the most prestigious award for book criticism in the country".
 * 2010: Parul Sehgal of Publishers Weekly
 * 2009: Joan Acocella of The New Yorker
 * 2008: Ron Charles of The Washington Post
 * 2007: Sam Anderson of New York magazine
 * 2006: Steven G. Kellman
 * 2005: Wyatt Mason, a contributor to Harper's, The New Yorker, The New Republic
 * 2004: David Orr, a contributor to The New York Times Book Review and Poetry Magazine
 * 2003: Scott McLemee
 * 2002: Maureen N. McLane
 * 2001: Michael Gorra
 * 2000: Daniel Mendelsohn
 * 1999: Benjamin Schwarz
 * 1998: Albert Mobilio
 * 1997: Thomas Mallon
 * 1996: Dennis Drabelle
 * 1995: Laurie Stone
 * 1994: JoAnn C. Gutin
 * 1993: Brigitte Frase
 * 1992: Elizabeth Ward
 * 1991: George Scialabba