Hanif Abdurraqib, Anne Carson, Hisham Matar among National Book Critics Circle Award Winners
New York, NY (March 20, 2025)—Tonight at the New School, the National Book Critics Circle announced the recipients of its book awards for publishing year 2024, and marked the 50th year the NBCC Awards have been bestowed. As 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.”
50th anniversary co-chair Jane Ciabattari highlighted past winners as she introduced distinguished speaker Maxine Hong Kingston, who won the 1976 award in nonfiction for The Woman Warrior, a year when the finalists and winners included Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, Bruno Bettelheim, and Alex Haley. As co-chair Jacob Appel noted, “Neither literature nor criticism would be possible without freedom of conscience and the NBCC remains committed to the welfare of dissident writers across the globe.”
The winners include Hisham Matar in fiction, for My Friends. As committee chair David Varno declared, Matar’s novel offers “a gripping and beautiful story of exile, literary obsession, and political intrigue,” one that “chronicles a Libyan man’s three decades in London and the friendships he makes there while involuntarily estranged from his family and homeland.”
Adam Higginbotham won the nonfiction award for Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. As committee chair Jo Livingstone stated, “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.”
The winner for autobiography was Alexei Navalny for Patriot: A Memoir, translated from the Russian by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel. As committee member Rebecca Hussey stated, 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.”
The biography award went to Cynthia Carr, author of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, the first full portrait of the queer icon and Warhol superstar. As Justin Torres said of the book, “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.”
Hanif Abdurraqib won the criticism award for There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. Committee chair J. Howard Rosier praised the book as “an innovative and lively assertion of the personal as political—rendered by examining the allure of sports culture over the state of Ohio.”
The winner for poetry was Anne Carson for Wrong Norma. As committee chair David Woo observed, 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.”
The Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, which honors both the author and translator, went to Gwendolyn Harper’s translation from the Spanish of A Last Supper of Queer Apostles by Pedro Lemebel. As committee chair Mandana Chaffa remarked, “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.”
Tessa Hulls won the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book for Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir. As committee chair Adam Dalva stated, 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.”
The NBCC Service Award went to Lori Lynn Turner, Associate Director of The New School Creative Writing Program. As past NBCC President and current Editor-in-Chief of Kirkus Reviews Tom Beer said in his remarks, “It’s safe to say that we would not be here tonight—or any night during the past 20 years—without her hard work and dedication to our mission…Lori Lynn has been our rock.” In addition to her work at The New School, Turner is also a writer and poet whose words have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, Guernica and more.
The recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to an NBCC member for exceptional critical work, was Lauren Michele Jackson. An American culture critic and assistant professor at Northwestern University, Jackson’s entry “took a fresh and penetrating look at” Percival Everett’s James, and “brought both serious analysis and wry humor” to Sarah Thornton’s Tits Up. As Balakian committee chair Colette Bancroft stated, Jackson’s work “displayed her insight, depth and range.”
The recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award was Sandra Cisneros. As award chair Jacob M. Appel declared, Cisneros was the first female Mexican-American writer to have her work—the modern classic The House on Mango Street—published by a major American publisher. Her follow-up collection, Woman Hollering Creed and Other Stories, “cemented her place among the leading figures in Chicano-American literature and as a beloved champion of marginalized voices crying out to be heard.” In her video appearance, Cisneros accepted the award with a poem that offered gratitude to “the word wranglers…the word-devout…the word-faithful…I give thanks to you / for your labor / My word kin.”
The recipient of the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, which honors institutions that have made lasting and meaningful contributions to book culture, was Third World Press, founded in 1967 by Dr. Haki R. Madhubuti. The largest independent Black-owned press in the United States, Third World has played a crucial role in ensuring the publication and continued availability of the works of major Black writers including Gloria Naylor, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Pearl Cleage, and, most notably, Gwendolyn Brooks. In addition, Appel stated, the press offered an essential platform both for new voices and for a range of writers who did not initially receive the attention they deserved from major publishers.
As Jane Ciabattari stated in her opening remarks, the founders of the NBCC were “driven by the vision of an organization that would reward literary excellence with awards chosen by the critics themselves, and extend the literary conversation nationwide.” 50 years later, the NBCCs remain the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book review editors. As Heather Scott Partington declared, “Our responsibility is to search far and wide for literary excellence, to champion the rare and innovative, to read and write tirelessly, and to bring more people into the literary conversation each year.”
Recipients of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Awards
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny, translated from the Russian by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel (Knopf)
BIOGRAPHY
Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
CRITICISM
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)
FICTION
My Friends by Hisham Matar (Random House)
NONFICTION
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham (Avid Reader)
POETRY
Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (New Directions)
GREGG BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION PRIZE
A Last Supper of Queer Apostles by Pedro Lemebel, translated from the Spanish by Gwendolyn Harper (Penguin Classics), Nonfiction
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
NBCC SERVICE AWARD
Lori Lynn Turner
NONA BALAKIAN CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN REVIEWING
Lauren Michele Jackson
TONI MORRISON ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Third World Press
IVAN SANDROF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Sandra Cisneros
Distinguished Guest Speaking in Honor of the NBCC’s 50th Anniversary
Maxine Hong Kingston
ABOUT THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE
The National Book Critics Circle was founded in 1974 at New York’s legendary Algonquin Hotel by a group of the most influential critics of the day, and awarded its first set of honors the following year. Comprising more than 800 working critics and book review editors throughout the country, the NBCC annually bestows its awards in six categories, honoring the best books published in the past year in the United States. It is considered one of the most prestigious awards in the publishing industry. The finalists for the NBCC awards are nominated, evaluated, and selected by the 24-member board of directors, which consists of critics and editors from some of the country’s leading print and online publications, as well as critics whose works appear in these publications. For more information about the history and activities of the National Book Critics Circle and to learn how to become a supporter, visit www.bookcritics.org.