NBCC winners snapshot

The National Book Critics Circle just handed fiction to Han Kang, nonfiction to Karen Hao, and autobiography to Arundhati Roy, which is a sharp little map of what critics are rewarding right now: translated fiction, power-reporting, and memoir from a novelist who has spent decades writing against the grain. (bookcritics.org) These awards were announced on March 26, 2026, but they cover books published in 2025, which is how the National Book Critics Circle has long done it. The group is made up of working critics and review editors, so its prizes often land a little differently from sales charts or celebrity-book-club picks. (bookcritics.org, bookcritics.org) Han Kang won fiction for We Do Not Part, in an English edition translated from Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The National Book Critics Circle listed it in fiction rather than in a separate translation slot, which puts the novel directly into the main current of the year’s English-language conversation. (bookcritics.org, bookcritics.org) Reporting on the award described the novel as a book about the 1948 to 1949 Jeju uprising in South Korea, where thousands were killed. That gives the win a double edge: Han Kang is already a Nobel laureate, and this particular book pulls historical violence into the center of a major American critics’ prize. (usnews.com, publishersweekly.com) Karen Hao won nonfiction for Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, a 2025 book from Penguin Press. The title alone tells you why it broke through: it takes the biggest technology story of the decade and pins it to one company, one executive, and one race for control. (bookcritics.org, penguinrandomhouse.com) The National Book Critics Circle’s citation for Hao said the book shows how “altruistic ideas” became a quest for dominance built on “exploitative labor.” That is not the language of a neutral industry overview; it is the language of a critics’ prize choosing an investigative account over a boosterish one. (bookcritics.org) Arundhati Roy won autobiography for Mother Mary Comes to Me, published by Scribner. The National Book Critics Circle described it as an intimate memoir that follows Roy from architecture student to writer while circling back to her mother across years and places. (bookcritics.org) That matters in Roy’s case because she is still best known to many readers for The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. This award pulls her back into view not as a novelist from the shelf of modern classics, but as a living memoirist with a new book in the middle of the season. (britannica.com, bookcritics.org) The full winners list makes the pattern even clearer: Kevin Young won poetry, Quinn Slobodian won criticism, Alex Green won biography, and Neige Sinno won the Barrios Book in Translation Prize in Natasha Lehrer’s English version. The board also gave the Toni Morrison Achievement Award to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, which puts literary criticism and public media in the same frame. (bookcritics.org, bookcritics.org) So if you are trying to read the room rather than just read the bestseller table, this year’s National Book Critics Circle list points in three directions at once: international fiction with historical weight, nonfiction about artificial intelligence and corporate power, and memoir by a writer whose political voice is inseparable from her literary one. That is a very specific picture of what serious readers are being nudged toward in spring 2026. (bookcritics.org, publishersweekly.com)