Winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night during a ceremony in New York City. NBCC president Heather Scott Partington said,"We celebrate your imagination, your fearlessness, and your persistence. Your words are essential, particularly in this time of division and censorship." This year's NBCC Award recipients are:
Autobiography: How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair (Simon & Schuster)
Biography: Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg (Knopf)
Criticism: Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression by Tina Post (NYU Press)
Fiction: I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore (Knopf)
Nonfiction: Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Poetry: Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi (New Directions)
The Gregg Barrios Prize for Book in Translation: Maureen Freely's translation of Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü (Transit Books)
The John Leonard Prize: Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman (Penguin Press)
NBCC Service Award: Marion Winik
The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Becca Rothfeld
Toni Morrison Achievement Award: American Library Association
The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: Judy Blume
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Elizabeth McCracken won the £4,000 (about $5,060) Wingate Literary Prize, which honors "the best book, fiction or nonfiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader," for The Hero of This Book.
The judges said: "In a timely and timeless fashion, McCracken's powerful writing lets you be privy to secrets you just want to shout about. A thoroughly involving read that wrestles with memory, illness, place and identity, The Hero of This Book is moving in every sense."