All Past National Book Critics Circle Award Winners and Finalists - Page 2

1994 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (Viking)

Fiction Finalists

• Alan Isler, The Prince of West End Avenue (Bridge Works)
• Julius Lester, And All Our Wounds Forgiven (Arcade)
• William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (Poseidon/Simon & Schuster)
• Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies (Algonquin)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jane Mayer & Jill Abramson, Strange Justice (Houghton Mifflin)
• Abraham Verghese, My Own Country (Simon & Schuster)
• Sherwin Nuland, How We Die (Knopf)
• John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (Doubleday)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec (Viking)
• Brenda Maddox, D.H. Lawrence (Simon & Schuster)
• Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist (Island Press)
• Neal Gabler, Winchell (Knopf)

Poetry Winner

• Mark Rudman, Rider (Wesleyan/New England)

Poetry Finalists

• Dorianne Laux, What We Carry (BOA Editions)
• Marilyn Hacker, Winter Numbers (Norton)
• Philip Levine, The Simple Truth (Knopf)
• Mary Jo Salter, Sunday Skaters (Knopf)

Criticism Winner

• Gerald Early, The Culture of Bruising (Ecco)

Criticism Finalists

• Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning (University of Chicago)
• Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (Harcourt Brace)
• Katha Pollitt, Reasonable Creatures (Knopf)
• Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (Knopf)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• JoAnn Gutin

Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publishing Winner

• William Maxwell

1995 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Stanley Elkin, Mrs. Ted Bliss (Hyperion)

Fiction Finalists

• Richard Ford, Independence Day (Knopf)
• Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Jane Smiley, Moo (Knopf)
• Paul West, The Tent of Orange Mist (Scribner)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action (Random House)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Nicholas Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (Holt)
• Madeleine Blais, In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (Atlantic)
• Fox Butterfield, All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (Knopf)
• Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (Pantheon)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Robert Polito, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence (Hyperion)
• Mary Karr, The Liars' Club (Viking)
• David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America (Knopf)
• Robert Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (California)

Poetry Winner

• William Matthews, Time & Money (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry Finalists

• Lynda Hull, The Only World (Harper)
• James Merrill, A Scattering of Salts (Knopf)
• Carl Phillips, Cortege (Graywolf)
• Ellen Bryant Voigt, Kyrie (Norton)

Criticism Winner

• Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolution France (Norton)

Criticism Finalists

• Stanley Crouch, The All-American Skin Game, or The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990-1994 (Pantheon)
• Thomas M. Disch, The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poest and Poetasters (Picador)
• John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale University Press)
• Clifford Geertz, After the Fact (Harvard University Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Laurie Stone

NBCC/Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winners

• Alfred Kazin
• Elizabeth Hardwick

1996 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Gina Berriault, Women in Their Beds (Counterpoint)

Fiction Finalists

• Louis Begley, About Schmidt (Knopf)
• Andre Dubus, Dancing After Hours (Knopf)
• Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Henry Roth, From Bondage (St. Martin's)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Jonathan Raban, Bad Land (Pantheon)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• David Denby, The Great Books (Simon & Schuster)
• Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf)
• Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes (Knopf)
• Bernard Lewis, The Middle East (Scribner)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes (Scribner)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Peter Conn, Pear S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge)
• David Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alan Shapiro, The Last Happy Occasion (Chicago)
• Jan Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life in Music (Norton)

Poetry Winner

• Robert Hass, Sun Under Wood (Ecco)

Poetry Finalists

• Stephen Dunn, Loosestrife (Norton)
• Martín Espada, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton)
• Jane Shore, Music Minus One (Picador)
• C.K. Williams, The Vigil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Winner

• William Gass, Finding a Form (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life (Nebraska)
• Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers)
• Dan Hofstadter, The Love Affair as a Work of Art (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Cynthia Ozick, Fame and Folly (Knopf)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Dennis Drabelle

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Albert Murray

1997 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (Mariner/Houghton)

Fiction Finalists

• Don DeLillo, Underworld (Scribner)
• Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (Grove)
• Andrei Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers (Arcade)
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (Villard)
• James Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Belknap Press)
• Pauline Maier, American Scripture (Knopf)
• Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (Norton)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• James Tobin, Ernie Pyle's War (Free Press)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx (Knopf)
• Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Knopf)
• Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade (HarperCollins)

Poetry Winner

• Charles Wright, Black Zodiac (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• Frank Bidart, Desire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Brenda Hillman, Loose Sugar (Wesleyan)
• Mark Jarman, Questions for Ecclesiastes (Story Line)
• Sonya Sanchez, Does Your House Have Lions? (Beacon)

Criticism Winner

• Mario Vargas Llosa, Making Waves (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Vivian Gornick, The End of the Novel of Love (Beacon)
• Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (Knopf)
• Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Harvard)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Thomas Mallon

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Leslie Fiedler

1998 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Michael Cunningham, The Hours (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• David Gates, Preston Falls (Knopf)
• Lorrie Moore, Birds of America (Knopf)
• Lynne Tillman, No Lease on Life (Harcourt)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Philip Gourevtich, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Out Families: Stories from Rwanda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton)
• Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Belknap: Harvard)
• Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (Norton)
• Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford Engligh Dictionary (HarperCollins)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Sylvia Nassar, A Beautiful Mind (Simon & Schuster)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Random House)
• Homer H. Hickman Jr., Rocket Boys: A Memoir (Delacorte)
• David Remnick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (Random House)
• Amanda Vaill, Everbody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story (Houghton)

Poetry Winner

• Marie Ponsot, The Bird Catcher (Knopf)

Poetry Finalists

• Pamela White Hadas, Self-Evidence (Triquarterly, Northwestern)
• Thylias Moss, Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler (Persea)
• Ann Carson, The Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (Knopf)
• Yusef Komunyakaa, Thieves of Paradise (Wesleyan)

Criticism Winner

• Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (Oxford)

Criticism Finalists

• Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage (North Point)
• Nelson George, Hip Hop America (Viking)
• Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead: Putnam)
• Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Albert Mobilio

1999 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday)

Fiction Finalists

• A. Manette Ansay, Midnight Champagne (Morrow)
• Frederick Busch, The Night Inspector (Harmony: Crown)
• J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Viking)
• David Gates, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Jonathan Weiner, Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jane Brox, Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History (Beacon)
• John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (Norton)
• Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory (Norton)
• Jean-Paul Kauffmann, The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena (Four Walls Eight Windows)

Bigoraphy/Autobiography Winner

• Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (St. Martin's)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Vol. II: Darker Reflections (Pantheon)
• Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (Random)
• Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Knopf)
• Susan E. Tifft & Alex S. Jones, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (Little, Brown)

Poetry Winner

• Ruth Stone, Ordinary Words (Paris Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Rafael Campo, Diva (Duke Univ. Press)
• Tory Dent, HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow)
• Rita Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (Norton)
• Susan Kingsolving, Dailies & Rushes (Grove)

Criticism Winner

• Jorge Louis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (Viking)

Criticism Finalists

• Stuart Klawans, Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order (Cassell)
• William Logan, Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry (Univ. Pr. of Florida)
• Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (Knopf)
• David Shields, Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (Crown)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Benjamin Schwarz

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winners

• Pauline Kael
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti

2000 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Jim Crace, Being Dead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Amy Bloom, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (Random House)
• Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Random House)
• David Means, Assorted Fire Events: Stories (Context Books)
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth (Random House)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (Random House)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Fred Anderson, Crucible of War (Knopf)
• Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (Simon & Schuster)
• Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (Hyperion)
• Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Univ. of Chicago)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (HarperCollins)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Robin Marantz Henig, The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics (Houghton Mifflin)
• Victor Kemplerer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945 (Random House)
• David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolf Hearst (Houghton Mifflin)
• Jean-Yves Tadie, Marcel Proust: A Life (Viking)

Poetry Winner

• Judy Jordan, Carolina Ghost Woods (LSU)

Poetry Finalists

• Michael Collier, The Ledge (Houghton Mifflin)
• Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (Knopf)
• Yusef Komunyakaa, Talking Dirty to the Gods (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Davis McCombs, Ultima Thule (Yale)

Criticism Winner

• Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to Present (HarperCollins)
• Claudia Roth Pierpont, Passionate Minds (Knopf)
• Charles Rosen, Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New (Harvard Univ. Press)
• Sherod Santos, A Poetry of Two Minds (University of Georgia Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Daniel Mendelsohn

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Barney Rosset

2001 Awards

Fiction Winner

• W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Random House)

Fiction Finalists

• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Knopf)
• Ann Patchett, Bel Canto (HarperCollins)
• Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (Pantheon)
• Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton University)
• Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (Random House)
• Sam Roberts, The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair (Random House)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Adam Sisman, Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Paula Fox, Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (Holt)
• David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Katherine Clark, Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on this Planet (Crown)
• Barry Werth, The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Poetry Winner

• Albert Goldbarth, Saving Lives (Ohio Statue University)

Poetry Finalists

• Louise Gluck, The Seven Ages (Ecco/HarperCollins)
• Bob Hicok, Animal Soul (Invisible Cities)
• Jane Hirshfield, Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins)
• Czeslaw Milosz, A Treatise on Poetry (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Criticism Winner

• Martin Amis, The War Against Clich: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (Talk Miramax)

Criticism Finalists

• H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale University)
• W.D. Snodgrass, De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong (Graywolf)
• Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (University of Georgia)
• Joy Williams, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (Lyons)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Michael Gorra

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Jason Epstein

2002 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Ian McEwan, Atonement (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Fiction Finalists

• Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
• William Kennedy, Roscoe (Viking)
• Edith Templeton, The Darts of Cupid: An Other Stories (Pantheon)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (PublicAffairs)
• William Langewiesche, American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (North Point Press/FSG)
• Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (Viking)
• Gaby Wood, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)
• Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (Viking)
• Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press)
• Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music (Simon & Schuster)

Poetry Winner

• B.H. Fairchild, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (Norton)

Poetry Finalists

• Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press)
• Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press)
• Sharon Olds, The Unswept Room (Knopf)
• Adam Zagajewski, Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Winner

• William H. Gass, Tests of Time (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Julia Blackburn, Old Man Goya (Pantheon)
• Christopher Ricks, Reviewery (Handsel Books/Other Press)
• Charles Rosen, Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (Free Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Maureen N. McLane

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Richard Howard

2003 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Edward P. Jones, The Known World (Amistad)

Fiction Finalists

• Monica Ali, Brick Lane (Scribner)
• Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Tobias Wolff, Old School (Knopf)
• Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Caroline Alexander, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (Viking Press)
• Anne Applebaum, Gulag (Doubleday)
• Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Scribner)
• William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down (McSweeneys)

Biography Winner

• William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (Norton)

Biography Finalists

• Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador)
• George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press)
• Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Winner

• Susan Stewart, Columbarium (University of Chicago Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Carolyn Forch, Blue Hour (HarperCollins)
• Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf)
• Vnus Khoury-Ghata, translated by Marilyn Hacker, She Says (Graywolf)
• Mary Szybist, Granted (Alice James Books)

Criticism Winner

• Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows (Viking Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Dagoberto Gilb, Gritos (Grove)
• Nick Hornby, Songbook (McSweeneys)
• Ross King, Michelangelo & the Popes Ceiling (Walker)
• Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Scott McLemee

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Studs Terkel

2004 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Knopf)
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury)
• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Random House)
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (Henry Holt)
• Edward Conlon, Blue Blood (Riverhead Books)
• David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf)
• Timothy Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (Crown)

Biography Winner

• Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press)
• Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Vol. 1 (Simon & Schuster)
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W.W. Norton)
• John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry Winner

• Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (W.W. Norton)

Poetry Finalists

• Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions)
• D.A. Powell, Cocktails (Graywolf)
• James Richardson, Interglacial (Ausable Press)
• Gary Snyder, Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard)

Criticism Winner

• Patrick Neate, Where Youre At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet (Riverhead Books)

Criticism Finalists

• Richard Howard, Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (W.W. Norton)
• Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Counterpoint)
• James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• David Orr

Ivan R. Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Louis Rubin Jr.

2005 Awards

Fiction Winner

• E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House)

Fiction Finalists

• Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon)
• Andrea Levy, Small Island (Picador)
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Knopf)
• William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Svetlana Alexievich, Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of Nuclear Disaster (Dalkey Archive Press)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Knopf)
• Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (Pantheon)
• Caroline Moorehead, Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books)
• Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (Henry Holt)

Biography Winner

• Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (Knopf)
• Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson (Continuum International)
• Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster)
• Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (Free Press)

Autobiography/Memoir Winner

• Francine du Plessix Gray, Them: A Memoir of Parents (Penguin Press)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf)
• Judith Moore, Fat Girl: A True Story (Gotham Books)
• Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (Knopf)
• Vikram Seth, Two Lives (HarperCollins)

Poetry Winner

• Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven (Knopf)

Poetry Finalists

• Simon Armitage, The Shout (Harcourt)
• Blas Manuel de Luna, Bent to the Earth (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press)
• Richard Siken, Crush (Yale University Press)
• Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books)

Criticism Winner

• William Logan, The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin (Columbia University Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Hal Crowther, Gather at the River: Notes From the Post-millennial South (Louisiana State Univ. Press)
• Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• John Updike, Still Looking: Essays on American Art (Knopf)
• Eliot Weinberger, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (New Directions)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Wyatt Mason

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Katherine Powers
• Allen Barra
• Carlin Romano

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Bill Henderson, author and director of The Pushcart Press

2006 Awards

Fiction Winner

• Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)

Fiction Finalists

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
• Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney's)
• Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
• Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
• Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
• Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Biography Winner

• Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin's Press)

Biography Finalists

• Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
• Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
• Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
• Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

Autobiography/Memoir Winner

• Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
• Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
• Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Winner

• Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. (Margie/Intuit House)

Poetry Finalists

• Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
• Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism Winner

• Lawrence Weschler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney's)

Criticism Finalists

• Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within (Doubleday)
• Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon (Viking)
• Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Steven G. Kellman

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Ron Charles
• Kathryn Harrison
• Gideon Lewis-Kraus
• Donna Rifkind

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• John Leonard

2007 Awards

Fiction Winner

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)

Fiction Finalists

• Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
• Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men (Dial Press)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter (Ecco)
• Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism (Hill & Wang)
• Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press)
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (Doubleday)
• Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne (BKs/St. Martin’s)

Biography Winner

• Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)

Biography Finalists

• Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (Knopf)
• Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison (Knopf)
• John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf)
• Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (Penguin Press)

Autobiography

• Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco)
• Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
• Anna Politkovskaya: Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia (Random House)

Poetry Winner

• Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)

Poetry Finalists

• Matthea Harvey, Modern Life (Graywolf)
• Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking (Flood)
• Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood)
• Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems (Archipelago)

Criticism Winner

• Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon)
• Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quniceanera (Viking)
• Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream (Metropolitan/Holt)
• Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Sam Anderson

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Brooke Allen
• Ron Charles
• Walter Kirn
• Adam Kirsch

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Emilie Buchwald

2008 Awards

Fiction Winner

• 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, Farrar, Strauss

Fiction Finalists

• Marilynne Robinson, Home, Farrar, Straus
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project, Riverhead
• M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, West Virginia University Press
• Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge, Random House

General Nonfiction Winner

• Dexter Filkins, The Forever War, Knopf

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War, Knopf
• Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, Doubleday
• Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, Atlantic
• George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776. Oxford University Press

Biography Winner

• Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul. Knopf.

Biography Finalists

• Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching. Amistad.(Knopf)
• Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family In An American Century. Penguin Press.
• Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Norton
• Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Knopf

Autobiography

• Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq. Algonquin

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Rick Bass, Why I Came West. Houghton Mifflin.
• Helene Cooper, The House On Sugar Beach, Simon and Schuster
• Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter. WW Norton
• Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves Of Heaven. Harmony Books.

Poetry Winners

• Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
• August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, Farrar, Strauss

Poetry Finalists

• Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
• Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
• Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Winner

• Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter, University of Chicago Press

Criticism Finalists

• Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard. Metropolitan Books
• Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life. Boston Review/MIT
• Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds. Doubleday
• Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, University of Michigan Press

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Ron Charles

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Michael Antman
• Kathryn Harrison
• Laila Lalami
• Todd Shy

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• PEN American Center