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.
George Packer is a US journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of the US from 1978 to 2012. In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His award-winning biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019. His latest book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal was released in June 2021.
Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, probably best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American.
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American author, essayist, critic, television writer, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008), and his scriptwriting as a co-writer of The Matrix Resurrections (2021).
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She is currently Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts' Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program. Tillman is the author of six novels, five collections of short stories, two collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books. She writes a bi-monthly column "In These Intemperate Times" for Frieze Art Magazine.
Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to generally positive reviews.
Andrew Solomon is a writer on politics, culture and psychology, who lives in New York City and London. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and Deaf politics.
Leopold Damrosch Jr. is an American author and professor. In 2001, he was named the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His areas of academic specialty include Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and *Puritanism.
Alan H. Weisman is an American author, professor and journalist.
David Louis Finkel is an American journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 as a staff writer at The Washington Post. As of January 2017, he was national enterprise editor at the Post. He has also worked for the Post's foreign staff division. He wrote The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.
David Hajdu is an American columnist, author and professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was the music critic for The New Republic for 12 years and is music editor at The Nation.
Carmen Giménez is an American poet, writer, and editor.
Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches in the Literary Journalism program. She received a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, as well as a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction. Wilentz was the Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, and is a contributing editor at The Nation.
T. J. Stiles is an American biographer who lives in Berkeley, California. His book The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt won a National Book Award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His book Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History.
John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of the literary magazine Granta until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world, including The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. He is currently an executive editor at the publishing house Knopf.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican author living in the United States. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction, and she was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her most recent book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2020 novel, Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Paul Hendrickson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He is a senior lecturer and member of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former member of the writing staff at the Washington Post.
Saeed Jones is an American writer and poet. His debut collection Prelude to Bruise was named a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His second book, a memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction in 2019.
Lacy M. Johnson is an American writer, professor and activist. She is the author of Trespasses: A Memoir, The Other Side: A Memoir and The Reckonings: Essays.
