National Book Critics Circle Announces Its Winners for the Publishing Year 2009

by Barbara Hoffert | Mar-12-2010

On Thursday, March11, 2010, at the New School’s Tishman auditorium in New York, the National Book Critics Circle announced its award winners for the publishing year 2009. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Holt), a Booker Prize winner last year, won the fiction award. The board saw it as an extraordinary accomplishment, original in voice and ambitious in style, that brings us into intimate contact with a compelling Cromwell.

The poetry award went to Rae Armantrout’s Versed (Wesleyan University Press) for its demonstration of superb intellect and technique, its melding of experimental poetics but down-to-earth subject matter to create poems you are compelled to return to, that get richer with each reading.

The nonfiction award went to Richard Holmes for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon), a book that links science and literature, re-creating a period that we associate with poetry—thus making new links and moving our thoughts in a whole new direction.

The criticism award was given to Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf), a quintessential essay collection that reveals emotional truths about our country. In biography, Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life (Knopf) won the biography award for a powerful example of reportage, a close reading of the life and the circumstances that delivers a superlative understanding of who the writer was. Finally, in autobiography, the board honored Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End (Norton) as a funny, exact, philosophical reflection, told from the end of the author’s life yet never presuming that age grants special wisdom—only some affecting and unexpected stories.

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Discuss this post.

First, you took forever to list the winners.

No, FIRST: is this not the NATIONAL BOOK ...?

N A T I O N A L.

Sorry, right. go on, leave’it out! tossers.

– GinaB (03/12 at 12-Mar 08:32 -05:00)

Wolf Hall is a great novel, but it seems highly inappropriate to choose a British author as the recipient of an American National Book Award. And I say that as a Canadian. I guess I’ll have to read the Cheever biography now too - although I find it hard to believe it’ll be better than either Susan Cheever’s memoir of her father, Home Before Dark or the amazing Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life.

– Ruth Seeley (03/14 at 14-Mar 21:57 -05:00)

The word “national” applies to the book critics, not to the books under consideration. There is certainly an argument to be made for narrowing the focus to American books only, but to much of the NBCC board, this seemed like an increasingly parochial approach. Hence the triumph of the Brits (and, last year, the Chilean Roberto Bolano). Home Before Dark is a fascinating book indeed, and the Carver bio also had its share of fans. But Blake Bailey’s smart, capacious account was hard to resist.

– James Marcus (03/14 at 14-Mar 23:02 -05:00)

1997 was the year the competition changed from awarding American authors to awarding any author of a book published in the United States. Explains the pool, and likely if I snoop around enough the reason for the change.

How a national panel of judges can deem books published in America of international scope I don’t know.

– GinaB (03/15 at 15-Mar 01:48 -05:00)

Gina, you’re right about the date: 1997 was the first year that non-American authors became eligible, and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower beat out DeLillo and Roth for the fiction prize. The reason for the change was the one to which I alluded above: the board felt that many distinguished books each year were excluded because their authors were not Americans. In an ideal world, the board would consider all books published in the previous year, regardless of where they came out. But in the real world—where the all-volunteer board crams its duties around non-NBCC chores—there isn’t time for that. So as a compromise, we consider anything published in the U.S., including all works translated into English. That expands the pool without drowning the jury.

– James Marcus (03/15 at 15-Mar 08:29 -05:00)

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"National Book Critics Circle Announces Its Winners for the Publishing Year 2009" was posted March 12, 2010 and written by Barbara Hoffert.

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