Fiction Winner

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Alice McDermott, Someone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Javier Marias, The Infatuations (Knopf)
• Ruth Ozeki, A Tale For The Time Being (Viking)
• Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little, Brown)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Sheri Fink, Five Days At Memorial: Life And Death In A Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Kevin Cullen And Shelley Murphy, Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster And The Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (Norton)
• David Finkel, Thank You For Your Service (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History Of The New America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood And The Prison Of Belief (Knopf)

Biography Winner

• Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life And His World (Yale University Press)

Biography Finalists

• Scott Anderson, Lawrence In Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly And The Making Of The Modern Middle East (Doubleday)
• John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music In The Castle Of Heaven (Knopf)
• Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life And Work Of Marianne Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Mark Thompson, Birth Certificate: The Story Of Danilo Kis (Cornell University Press)

Autobiography

• Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (Simon & Schuster)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave (Knopf)
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Book Of My Lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (Viking)
• Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury)

Poetry Winner

• Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Knopf)
• Denise Duhamel, Blowout (University Of Pittsburgh Press)
• Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon)
• Carmen Gimenez Smith, Milk And Filth (University Of Arizona Press)

Criticism Winner

• Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (Verso)

Criticism Finalists

• Hilton Als, White Girls (Mcsweeney’s)
• Mary Beard, Confronting The Classics: Traditions, Adventures And Innovations (Liveright)
• Jonathan Franzen, The Kraus Project: Essays By Karl Kraus, Translated And Annotated By Jonathan Franzen With Paul Reiter And Daniel Kehlmann (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays On Artists And Writers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

John Leonard Prize

• Anthony Marra, A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Katherine A. Powers

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Ruth Franklin
• James Marcus
• Roxana Robinson
• Alexandra Schwartz

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Rolando Hinojosa-Smith

Fiction Winner

• Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)

Fiction Finalists

• Laurent Binet, HHhH. tr. by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House)
• Lydia Millet, Magnificence (W. W. Norton)
• Zadie Smith, NW (The Penguin Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
• Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (The Penguin Press)
• Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
• David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (W.W. Norton)

Biography Winner

• Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
• Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (University of California Press)
• Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (Crown Publishers)

Autobiography

• Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (Blue Rider Press)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us (Atria Books)
• Maureen N. McLane, My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, In the House of the Interpreter (Pantheon)

Poetry Winner

• D. A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press)

Poetry Finalists

• David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)
• Lucia Perillo, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press)
• Allan Peterson, Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Books)
• A. E. Stallings, Olives (Triquarterly: Northwestern University Press)

Criticism Winner

• Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Books)
• Mary Ruefle Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books)
• Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• William Deresiewicz

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Abigail Deutsch
• Lev Grossman
• Garth Risk Hallberg
• Kathryn Harrison

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Fiction Winner

• Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)

Fiction Finalists

• Teju Cole, Open City (Random House)
• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Knopf)
• Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random)
• James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon)
• Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

Biography Winner

• John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press)

Biography Finalists

• Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution (Little, Brown)
• Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 (Knopf)
• Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking)
• Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)

Autobiography

• Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (Free Press)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing (W.W. Norton)
• Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (Little, Brown)
• Luis J. Rodríguez, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone)
• Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Henry Holt)

Poetry Winner

• Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions)
• Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions)
• Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
• Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

Criticism Winner

• Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf)

Criticism Finalists

• David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber)
• Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday)
• Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture (Open Letter)
• Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University of Minnesota Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Kathryn Schulz

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• William Deresiewicz
• Ruth Franklin
• Garth Risk Hallberg
• Kathryn Harrison

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Robert B. Silvers

Fiction Winner

• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• David Grossman, To the End of the Land (Knopf)
• Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key, tr. by Damion Searls (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (Faber & Faber)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Random House)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Spiegel & Grau)
• S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (Scribner)
• Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (Random House)
• Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner)

Biography Winner

• Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Other Press)

Biography Finalists

• Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (Random House)
• Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History (W.W. Norton)
• Thomas Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse (Knopf)
• Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (Doubleday)

Autobiography

• Darin Strauss, Half a Life (McSweeney’s)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956–1978 (Scribner)
• David Dow, The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve)
• Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (Twelve)
• Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Hiroshima in the Morning (Feminist Press)
• Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco)

Poetry Winner

• C. D. Wright’s One with Others: [a little book of her days] (Copper Canyon)

Poetry Finalists

• Anne Carson, Nox (New Directions)
• Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)
• Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Penguin Poets)
• Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press)

Criticism Winner

• Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (Harper)
• Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press)
• Ander Monson, Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Parul Sehgal

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Sarah L. Courteau
• William Deresiewicz
• Ruth Franklin
• Kathryn Harrison

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Dalkey Archive Press

Fiction Winner

• Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)

Fiction Finalists

• Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
• Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
• Michelle Huneven, Blame (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG)
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press)
• Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)
• Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains (Random House)
• William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking)

Biography Winner

• Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (Little, Brown)
• Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press)
• Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)

Autobiography

• Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin)
• Mary Karr, Lit (Harper)
• Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
• Edmund White, City Boy (Bloomsbury)

Poetry Winner

• Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)

Poetry Finalists

• Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• D.A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)
• Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
• Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)

Criticism Winner

• Eula Biss, Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf Press)
• Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)
• David Hajdu, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo Press)
• Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Joan Acocella

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Michael Antman
• William Deresiewicz
• Donna Seaman
• Wendy Smith

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Joyce Carol Oates

Fiction Winner

• Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• 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 (W.W. 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, Straus & Giroux)

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

Fiction Winner

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

Fiction Finalists

• Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
• Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men (Dial Press)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s 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

• Alex Ross, 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

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 America: 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

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

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 You’re 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.