The National Book Critics Circle Award

2017 NBCC Award Winners

2017 Nonfiction Finalists

Jack E. Davis, The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea (Liveright)

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon & Schuster)

Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead)

Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (Graywolf)

Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes (The Experiment)

Biography Finalists

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Metropolitan Books)

Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (Oxford University Press)

Howard Markel, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek (Pantheon)

William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (W.W. Norton)

Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf)

Autobiography

Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (Abrams)   

Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper)

Henry Marsh, Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins)

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, translated by Anna Summers (Penguin)   

Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China (Grove)   

Poetry

Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular (Oxford University Press)  

James Longenbach, Earthling (W.W. Norton)

Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf)

Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow (Wake Forest University Press)

Ana Ristović, Directions for Use, translated by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Zephyr Press)

Criticism Finalists

Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages (Mariner)

Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Graywolf)

Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History  (W.W. Norton)   

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House)                  

Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News (Graywolf)   

Fiction Finalists

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (Riverhead)

Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Knopf)

Joan Silber, Improvement (Counterpoint)

Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

David Biespiel, Maureen Corrigan, Ruth Franklin, James Marcus

Announcing the National Book Critics Awards Finalists for Publishing Year 2017