The National Book Critics Circle announced the longlist for its nonfiction prize, with Hanif Abdurraqib and Adam Higginbotham among the authors in contention for the award.
This is the first year the organization is revealing longlists for its awards, a move inspired by the group’s 50th anniversary. The prizes are voted on by members of the NBCC’s 24-person board. (Disclosure: This reporter is a member of the board.)
Abdurraqib made the longlist for There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. The author was earlier longlisted for the NBCC Award in criticism.
Higginbotham was nominated for his Kirkus Prize-winning Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. Edwidge Danticat was longlisted for We’re Alone; the author won the NBCC Award for fiction in 2019 for Everything Inside, and was shortlisted for the organization’s awards for her books Brother, I’m Dying; The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story; and The Dew Breaker.
John Edgar Wideman made the longlist for Slaveroad, his third nomination for the nonfiction prize after Brothers and Keepers and Writing To Save a Life: The Louis Till File. Steve Coll, who previously won the nonfiction award for Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and was shortlisted for Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, made this year’s longlist for The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq.
Also making this year’s longlist were Lawrence Ingrassia for A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery; Tricia Romano for The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture; Brian VanDeMark for Kent State: An American Tragedy; Zoë Schlange for The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth; and Gretchen Sisson for Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.
The shortlists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards will be revealed on Jan. 23, 2025, with the winners announced at a ceremony in New York on March 20, 2025.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
