We’re proud to announce the finalists for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards, along with the winners of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award!
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World)
Shayla Lawson, This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope (HarperPerennial)
Riva Lehrer, Golem Girl (One World)
Wayétu Moore, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women (Graywolf)
Alia Volz, Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (HMH)
BIOGRAPHY
Amy Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner)
Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (Random House)
Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf)
Les Payne, Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright)
Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (Knopf)
CRITICISM
Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard Univ. Press)
Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces (Transit)
Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press)
Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Wendy A. Woloson, Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (Univ. of Chicago Press)
FICTION
Martin Amis, Inside Story (Knopf)
Randall Kenan, If I Had Two Wings (W.W. Norton)
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Knopf)
Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife (Little, Brown)
Bryan Washington, Memorial (Riverhead)
NONFICTION
Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St, Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic)
James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (Penguin Press)
Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs (Scribner)
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (Random House)
Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Harvard Univ. Press)
POETRY
Victoria Chang, Obit (Copper Canyon)
Francine J. Harris, Here Is The Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Imperial Liquor (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press)
Chris Nealon, The Shore (Wave)
Danez Smith, Homie (Graywolf)
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
Kerri Arsenault, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains (St. Martin’s)
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans (One World)
Raven Leilani, Luster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Megha Majumdar, A Burning (Knopf)
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (Grove)
Brandon Taylor, Real Life (Riverhead)
C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead)
NONA BALAKIAN CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN REVIEWING
Jo Livingstone
Finalists
Rumaan Alam
Jake Cline
Sophie Haigney
Dean Rader
IVAN SANDROF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
The Feminist Press at the City University of New York