The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced Thursday evening in a ceremony held at the New School in New York City, with Lorrie Moore, Roxanna Asgarian, and Safiya Sinclair among the authors taking home prizes.
Lorrie Moore received the fiction prize for I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, a wide-ranging novel set, variously, in a Civil War–era boardinghouse, a hospice in the Bronx, and the underworld. In a review last year, a Kirkus critic wrote of the book, “It doesn’t get more elegiac than this.”
The nonfiction award went to Roxanna Asgarian for We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, an exploration of foster-care system and the deaths of six adopted children, killed by their adoptive parents, in 2018. A Kirkus reviewer called the book a “sobering call to action demanding reform of the child-protective and foster-care regimes”; in January it received the Andrew Carnegie Medal from the American Library Association.
Safiya Sinclair won the autobiography award for How To Say Babylon, about the author’s upbringing in a strict Rastafarian family in Jamaica and discovery of her voice as a poet. The memoir was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction last year. “More than catharsis; this is memoir as liberation,” wrote a Kirkus critic in a starred review.
The biography award went to Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, Jonny Steinberg’s book about Nelson and Winnie Mandela; in a starred review, Kirkus called it a “magnificent portrait of two people joined in the throes of making South African history.”
The winner of the criticism award was Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression by Tina Post, while the poetry prize went to Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi. The Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize went to Maureen Freely’s translation of the late author Tzer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood. The John Leonard Prize, given to a first book in any genre, was awarded to Waiting To Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide, written by Tahir Hanut Izgil and translated by John L. Freeman.
Several special awards were presented as well. The NBCC Service Award was given to Marion Winik; the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing went to Becca Rothfeld; the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award was given to author Judy Blume; and the Toni Morrison Achievement Award went to the American Library Association.
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
