Winners of the National Book Critics Circle awards were announced last night at a 50th anniversary celebration. NBCC president Heather Scott Partington declared, "Never has there been a more urgent need for criticism, for free speech, for writing that questions, talks back to, and interprets other writing... The NBCC affirms the right of every person to see themselves reflected in books. As the NBCC moves into our next chapter, we stand with the organizations fighting to protect our rights to write and read."
The winners, with comments:
Autobiography: Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny, translated from the Russian by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel (Knopf). "Patriot is the personal story of one man standing up to authoritarianism and paying the ultimate price. A prison memoir, an eyewitness account of history, and a work of moral imperative and literary intelligence, Patriot is a masterpiece." -- Rebecca Hussey
Biography: Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). "Cynthia Carr has written an absorbing account of an unforgettable woman in a fascinating time, a lonely icon who tried to find a place for herself in a world that couldn't hold her." --Justin Torres
Criticism: There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House). "An innovative and lively assertion of the personal as political--rendered by examining the allure of sports culture over the state of Ohio." --J. Howard Rosier
Fiction: My Friends by Hisham Matar (Random House). "A gripping and beautiful story of exile, literary obsession, and political intrigue [that] chronicles a Libyan man's three decades in London and the friendships he makes there while involuntarily estranged from his family and homeland." --David Varno
Nonfiction: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham (Avid Reader). "Surprisingly propulsive in form and shocking in the facts it reveals, Challenger is a story of incompetence fostered when government agencies are invaded by corporate decision-makers." --Jo Livingstone
Poetry: Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (New Directions). Carson's "magnificently witty and desolate pieces attest to a struggle to represent not only the reality of others but a self that, in its mortal decline and self-reflexive unknowability, may be the most exquisitely difficult to encompass of all." --David Woo
Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize: A Last Supper of Queer Apostles by Pedro Lemebel, translated from the Spanish by Gwendolyn Harper (Penguin Classics). "This thrilling collection of essays--or crónicas--by the late Chilean literary activist and queer icon Pedro Lemebel is beautifully supported by Gwendolyn Harper's supple translation." --Mandana Chaffa
John Leonard Prize: Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This "genre-bending work merges beautiful art and marvelous storytelling to examine three generations of women: the author's grandmother, Sun Yi, her mother, Rose, and Hulls herself. Along the way, it explores mental illness, Chinese history, and inherited trauma." --Adam Dalva