NBCC awards named

The National Book Critics Circle handed out its 2025 book awards on March 26 at the New School in Manhattan, and three winners jumped out immediately: Han Kang in fiction, Karen Hao in nonfiction, and Arundhati Roy in autobiography. The awards are chosen by working critics, not by sales charts or a public vote, so the list often lands like a snapshot of what reviewers think will last. (bookcritics.org) Han Kang won fiction for *We Do Not Part*, in a translation by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The National Book Critics Circle said the novel moves through the 1948 to 1949 Jeju uprising in South Korea, where thousands of people were killed. (bookcritics.org) That win landed less than two years after Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, which turned her from a major literary figure into a global one. The National Book Critics Circle prize shows that the English-language critical world is still following her beyond the Nobel headline and into the newer work. (publishersweekly.com) Karen Hao won nonfiction for *Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI*. The Associated Press description of the book is unusually blunt for an awards brief: it calls the book an examination of artificial intelligence and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. (usnews.com) That choice says something about the lane the judges wanted nonfiction to occupy in 2026. Instead of rewarding a distant history or a campaign memoir, they picked a reported book about the company that helped turn artificial intelligence from a specialist tool into a household argument. (bookcritics.org, usnews.com) Arundhati Roy won autobiography for *Mother Mary Comes to Me*, which puts one of the world’s best-known novelists into a more personal register. Roy has spent decades moving between fiction and political essays, and this award places her memoir writing in the same top tier as her public-intellectual work. (bookcritics.org, publishersweekly.com) The full winners list makes the pattern clearer. Kevin Young won poetry for *Night Watch*, Alex Green won biography for *A Perfect Turmoil*, and Quinn Slobodian won criticism for *Hayek’s Bastards*, which means the board spread its prizes across lyric writing, life writing, political thought, and tech reporting instead of clustering around one mood or one subject. (bookcritics.org) The National Book Critics Circle has been giving these awards since the 1970s, and its categories are tied to books published in the previous year, which is why the March 2026 ceremony honored the 2025 publishing year. That timing makes the awards feel less like launch-week hype and more like a second verdict after critics have had months to argue. (bookcritics.org, bookbrowse.com) If you want the shortest read on this year’s list, it is this: the critics rewarded one novel about historical massacre, one reported book about the artificial intelligence boom, and one memoir by a novelist with a long political record. That is a clean picture of what serious English-language criticism is rewarding right now: memory, systems, and the people caught inside both. (bookcritics.org, publishersweekly.com, lithub.com)