The blog will be a bit quiet for the next few days: Today the NBCC board of directors holds its first meeting of the 2008 season to welcome new board members, elect a new president, establish a new blogging committee, begin discussing 2008 books, and much more. The board will be in meetings and in transit for several days, so expect slowness here until sometime next week as we get the new blogging committee up and running.
In the meantime, here is the list of this years winners and finalists:
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: Emilie Buchwald
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Sam Anderson
Criticism
2007 Winner: The Rest is Noise, by Alex Ross
2007 Finalists:
Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA
Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
Poetry
2007 Winner: Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang
2007 Finalists:
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life
Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan
Tadeusz Różewicz, New Poems, trans. by Bill Johnston
Biography
2007 Winner: Stanley, the Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, by Tim Jeal
2007 Finalists:
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography
John Richardson, The Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy
General Nonfiction
2007 Winner: Medical Apartheid, by Harriet Washington
2007 Finalists:
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
Autobiography
2007 Winner: Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying
2007 Finalists:
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia
Fiction
2007 Winner: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
2007 Finalists:
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher