The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, established in 1976, [1] is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." [2] Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism.
Books previously published in English are not eligible, such as re-issues and paperback editions. They do consider "translations, short story and essay collections, self published books, and any titles that fall under the general categories." [3]
The judges are the volunteer directors of the NBCC who are 24 members serving rotating three-year terms, with eight elected annually by the voting members, namely "professional book review editors and book reviewers." [4] Winners of the awards are announced each year at the NBCC awards ceremony in conjunction with the yearly membership meeting, which takes place in March. [3]
Year | Author | Title | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
1975 | Edith Wharton: A Biography | Winner | [5] | |
1976 | Winner | [6] | ||
George Dangerfield | The Damnable Question: A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations | Finalist | [6] | |
Alex Haley | Roots | |||
Irving Howe with Kenneth Libo | World of Our Fathers | |||
Richard Kluger | Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality | |||
1977 | Samuel Johnson | Winner | [7] | |
Michael Herr | Dispatches | Finalist | [7] | |
David McCullough | The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 | |||
John McPhee | Coming Into the Country | |||
Carl Sagan | The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence | |||
1978 | Facts of Life | Winner | [8] | |
Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence | ||||
Barbara W. Tuchman | A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century | Finalist | [8] | |
Theodore H. White | In Search of History: A Personal Adventure | |||
Barrington Moore | Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt | |||
Sissela Bok | Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life | |||
A. Scott Berg | Max Perkins: Editor of Genius | |||
Alfred Kazin | New York Jew | |||
Anne Hollander | Seeing Through Clothes | |||
Peter Matthiessen | The Snow Leopard | |||
1979 | Munich: The Price of Peace | Winner | [9] | |
Tom Wolfe | The Right Stuff | Finalist | [9] | |
Joan Didion | The White Album | |||
Edward Hoagland | African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan | |||
Douglas Hofstadter | Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain | |||
1980 | Walter Lippmann and the American Century | Winner | [10] | |
Jean Strouse | Alice James: A Biography | Finalist | [10] | |
Maxine Hong Kingston | China Men | |||
John Boswell | Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th Century | |||
Justin D. Kaplan | Walt Whitman: A Life | |||
1981 | Winner | [11] | ||
James Fallows | National Defense | Finalist | [11] | |
T.J. Jackson Lears | No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 | |||
Dumas Malone | The Sage of Monticello: Jefferson and His Time, Volume Six | |||
Erving Goffman | Forms of Talk | |||
1982 | Winner | [12] | ||
George F. Kennan | The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age | Finalist | [12] | |
Jonathan Schell | The Fate of the Earth | |||
Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe | Stolen Lightning | |||
Kate Simon | Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood | |||
1983 | The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House | Winner | [13] | |
Roger Rosenblatt | Children of War | Finalist | [13] | |
William W. Warner | Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman | |||
Theodore Draper | Present History: On Nuclear War, Detente and Other | |||
David S. Landes | Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World | |||
1984 | Weapons and Hope | Winner | [14] | |
David Wyman | The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 | Finalist | [14] | |
John Edgar Wideman | Brothers and Keepers | |||
Robert Darnton | The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History | |||
Evan Connell | Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn | |||
1985 | Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families | Winner | [15] | |
Tracy Kidder | House | Finalist | [15] | |
Elaine Scarry | The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World | |||
Alan Riding | Distant Neighbors: The Portrait of the Mexicans | |||
Eva Keuls | The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens | |||
1986 | Barry Lopez | Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape | Winner | [16] |
Bernard Bailyn | Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution | Finalist | [16] | |
Jonathan Evan Maslow | Bird of Life, Bird of Death: A Naturalist’s Journey Through a Land of Political Turmoil | |||
John W. Dower | War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War | |||
Marc Reisner | Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water | |||
1987 | Winner | [17] | ||
Randy Shilts | And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic | Finalist | [17] | |
James Miller | Democracy Is in the Streets | |||
Charles Mee | The Genius of the People | |||
Stephen Jay Gould | Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle | |||
1988 | Winner | [18] | ||
James M. McPherson | Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era | Finalist | [18] | |
Neil Sheehan | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | |||
Jane Kramer | Europeans | |||
Eric Foner | Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 | |||
1989 | The Broken Cord | Winner | [19] | |
Tracy Kidder | Among Schoolchildren | Finalist | [19] | |
Barbara Ehrenreich | Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class | |||
David Fromkin | A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 | |||
Amy Wilentz | The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier | |||
1990 | The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America | Winner | [20] | |
Mike Davis | City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles | Finalist | [20] | |
Alma Guillermoprieto | Samba | |||
O.B. Hardison | Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the 20th Century | |||
Kevin Phillips | The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath | |||
1991 | Winner | [21] | ||
Thomas Geoghegan | Which Side Are You on? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back | Finalist | [21] | |
Melissa Fay Greene | Praying for Sheetrock | |||
Jonathan Kozol | Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools | |||
Dennis Overbye | Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe | |||
1992 | Winner | [22] | ||
Michael D. Coe | Breaking the Maya Code | Finalist | [22] | |
Donald Katz | Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America | |||
Nancy Scheper-Hughes | Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil | |||
Edward O. Wilson | The Diversity of Life | |||
1993 | The Land Where the Blues Began | Winner | [23] | |
Rosemary Mahoney | Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age | Finalist | [23] | |
George B. Schaller | The Last Panda | |||
Russ Rymer | Genie: An Abused Child’s Flight From Silence | |||
David Remnick | Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire | |||
1994 | The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War | Winner | [24] | |
Jane Mayer & Jill Abramson | Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas | Finalist | [24] | |
Abraham Verghese | My Own Country: A Doctor's Story | |||
Sherwin Nuland | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter | |||
John Demos | The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America | |||
1995 | Winner | [25] | ||
Nicholas Basbanes | A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books | Finalist | [25] | |
Madeleine Blais | In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle | |||
Fox Butterfield | All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence | |||
Lawrence Weschler | Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder | |||
1996 | Winner | [26] | ||
David Denby | Great Books | Finalist | [26] | |
Daniel Goldhagen | Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust | |||
Richard Kluger | Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris | |||
Bernard Lewis | The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years | |||
1997 | Winner | [27] | ||
Jon Krakauer | Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster | Finalist | [27] | |
James Kugel | The Bible as It Was | |||
Pauline Maier | American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence | |||
Stephen Pinker | How the Mind Works | |||
1998 | We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families | Winner | [28] | |
Adam Hochschild | King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa | Finalist | [28] | |
Ira Berlin | Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America | |||
Roy Porter | The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity | |||
Simon Winchester | The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary | |||
1999 | Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior | Winner | [29] | |
Jane Brox | Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History | Finalist | [29] | |
John W. Dower | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | |||
Patricia Hampl | I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory | |||
Jean-Paul Kauffmann | The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon’s Exile on Saint Helena | |||
2000 | Winner | |||
Fred Anderson | Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 | Finalist | ||
Frances FitzGerald | Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War | |||
Laurie Garrett | Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health | |||
Alice Kaplan | The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach | |||
2001 | Winner | [30] | ||
Nina Bernstein | The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care | Finalist | [30] | |
Jan T. Gross | Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland | |||
Laura Hillenbrand | Seabiscuit: An American Legend | |||
Sam Roberts | The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair | |||
2002 | Winner | [31] | ||
Chris Hedges | War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning | Finalist | [31] | |
William Langewiesche | American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center | |||
Richard Rodriguez | Brown: The Last Discovery of America | |||
Gaby Wood | Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life | |||
2003 | Winner | [32] | ||
Caroline Alexander | The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty | Finalist | [33] | |
Anne Applebaum | Gulag | |||
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc | Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age | |||
William T. Vollmann | Rising Up and Rising Down | |||
2004 | Winner | [34] | ||
Kevin Boyle | Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age | Finalist | [34] | |
Edward Conlon | Blue Blood | |||
David Shipler | The Working Poor: Invisible in America | |||
Timothy Tyson | Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story | |||
2005 | Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster | Winner | [35] | |
Robert Fisk | The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East | Finalist | [35] | |
Ellen Meloy | Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild | |||
Caroline Moorehead | Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees | |||
Anthony Shadid | Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War | |||
2006 | Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution | Winner | [36] | |
Patrick Cockburn | The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq | Finalist | [36] | |
Anne Fessler | The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade | |||
Michael Pollan | The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | |||
Sandy Tolan | The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East | |||
2007 | Winner | [37] [38] [39] | ||
American Transcendentalism | Finalist | [38] | ||
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848 | ||||
2008 | Winner | [40] | ||
From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 | Finalist | [40] [41] | ||
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals | ||||
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | ||||
White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement | ||||
2009 | The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science | Winner | [42] [43] [44] | |
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City | Finalist | [42] | ||
Strength in What Remains | ||||
2010 | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Winner | [45] [46] | |
Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet | Finalist | [45] | ||
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American | ||||
2011 | Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World | Winner | [47] [48] | |
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War | Finalist | [49] [47] [48] | ||
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 | ||||
2012 | Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity | Winner | [50] [51] | |
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Finalist | [50] [52] [53] | ||
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power | ||||
2013 | Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital | Winner | [54] [55] | |
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief | Finalist | [54] [56] | ||
Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy | Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice | |||
2014 | The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation | Winner | [57] [58] | |
Thomas Piketty with Arthur Goldhammer (trans.) | Finalist | [57] [59] | ||
Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free | ||||
Peter Finn and Petra Couvee | The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book | |||
2015 | Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic | Winner | [60] | |
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America | Finalist | [60] | ||
Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America | ||||
What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing | ||||
2016 | Winner | [61] | ||
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right | Finalist | [61] | ||
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War | ||||
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America | ||||
Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File | ||||
2017 | The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America | Winner | [62] [63] [64] | |
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes | Finalist | [65] [62] | ||
Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe | ||||
Gulf: The Making of An American Sea | ||||
The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia | ||||
2018 | Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan | Winner | [66] [67] [68] [69] | |
God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State | Finalist | [66] | ||
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt | ||||
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border | ||||
We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights | ||||
2019 | Say Nothing: The True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland | Winner | [70] [71] | |
Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future | Finalist | [70] | ||
No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us | ||||
Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives | ||||
The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution | ||||
2020 | Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire | Winner | [72] [73] [74] | |
Finalist | [73] | |||
Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future | ||||
She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs | ||||
The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States | ||||
2021 | How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America | Winner | [75] | |
Finalist | [76] [77] [78] | |||
The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth | ||||
2022 | The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act | Winner | [79] | |
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands | Finalist | [80] | ||
Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between | ||||
Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis | ||||
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us | ||||
2023 | We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America | Winner | [81] | |
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs | Finalist | [82] | ||
Who Gets Believed? When the Truth Isn’t Enough | ||||
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an American nonprofit organization with more than 700 members. It is the professional association of American book review editors and critics, known primarily for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, a set of literary awards presented every March.
The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English". The first NBCC awards were announced and presented January 16, 1976.
PEN/Open Book is a program intended to foster racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities, and works to establish access for diverse literary groups to the publishing industry. Created in 1991 by the PEN American Center, the PEN/Open Book program ensures custodians of language and literature are representative of the American people.
The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, established in 1981, is an annual literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle in honor of its first president, Ivan Sandrof. The award "is given to a person or institution who has, over time, made significant contributions to book culture." The Sandrof 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."
The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, established in 1991, is an annual literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to honor Nona Balakian, one of three NBCC founders. The award recognizes an NBCC's members "outstanding work" and has been called "the most prestigious award for book criticism in the country."
The John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, established in 2013, is an annual literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) for authors' first books in any genre. Unlike other NBCC awards, recipients are selected by members, not the board.
The Kirkus Prize is an American literary award conferred by the book review magazine Kirkus Reviews. Established in 2014, the Kirkus Prize bestows US$150,000 annually. Three authors are awarded US$50,000 each, divided into three categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Young Readers' Literature. It has been described as one of the most lucrative prizes in literature.
The Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize is an annual award presented by the New Literary Project to recognize mid-career writers of fiction. "Mid-career writer" is defined by the project as "an author who has published at least two notable books of fiction, and who has yet to receive capstone recognition such as a Pulitzer or a MacArthur." The prize, which carries a monetary award of $50,000, was established in 2017 and is administered by the New Literary Project, a collaboration of the Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation of Lafayette, California and the Department of English of the University of California, Berkeley.
How to Pronounce Knife is a short story collection by Souvankham Thammavongsa, published in 2020 by McClelland & Stewart. The stories in the collection centre principally on the experiences of Laotian Canadian immigrant families, sometimes from the perspective of children observing the world of adults.
The Gotham Book Prize is awarded annually to a fiction or non-fiction work judged the best about or set in New York City. The award was founded by Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson.
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 2022.
Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party's Promise to the People is a nonfiction book about the Black Panther Party, written by Kekla Magoon and published November 23, 2021 by Candlewick Press. In 2021, the book was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, established in 1976, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English."
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography, established in 2005, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism. Between 1983 and 2004, the award was presented jointly with biography.
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, established in 1975, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English". Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism.
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, established in 1983, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism.
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, established in 1975, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism.
Rebecca Donner is a Canadian-born writer. She is the author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, which won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, and The Chautauqua Prize She was a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship. She is currently a 2023-2024 Fellow at Harvard.
Morgan Talty (Penobscot) is a writer and an assistant professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and Contemporary Literature at the University of Maine in Orono.
Noor Naga is a Canadian-Egyptian writer, most noted for her 2022 novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English.