NBCC winners announced
The National Book Critics Circle just named this year’s top books — showing where serious reading taste is headed right now. Han Kang’s We Do Not Part won the fiction prize, Karen Hao’s Empire of AI won for nonfiction, and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me won for autobiography, giving you a shortlist that spans literary fiction, tech-focused reporting, and memoir. (blog.abc.nl)
A critics’ prize in New York just handed fiction to a South Korean Nobel winner, nonfiction to a reporter who wrote about OpenAI, and autobiography to an Indian novelist writing about her mother. The National Book Critics Circle announced the 2025 publishing-year winners on March 26 at The New School. (bookcritics.org) The National Book Critics Circle is not a sales chart or a reader-vote award. It is a U.S. critics’ organization that gives annual prizes for books published in English in six main categories: fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry, and criticism. (bookcritics.org) That helps explain why this list feels less like “the biggest books” and more like “the books critics want to keep arguing about.” This year’s ceremony also marked the group’s 50th anniversary, which gave the winners list extra weight inside the publishing world. (bookcritics.org) Han Kang won fiction for *We Do Not Part*, in a translation by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The novel centers on the 1948–1949 Jeju uprising in South Korea, where thousands of people were killed, so the award also puts historical memory and translation at the center of the fiction conversation. (bookcritics.org, abcnews.com) Karen Hao won nonfiction for *Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI*. Publishers Weekly described the book as part of an awards slate presented in eight competitive categories, and ABC’s wire report said the book examines OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which tells you how directly this year’s nonfiction winner sits inside the current artificial intelligence boom. (publishersweekly.com, abcnews.com) Arundhati Roy won autobiography for *Mother Mary Comes to Me*. Roy has been globally famous since *The God of Small Things* won the Booker Prize in 1997, so seeing her take an autobiography prize now shows critics rewarding a writer long known for fiction and political essays in a more intimate register. (bookcritics.org, britannica.com) The rest of the winners fill out the same pattern. Kevin Young won poetry for *Stones*, Nicholas Boggs won biography for *Baldwin: A Love Story*, and Moira Donegan won criticism for *Poet-Critic*. (bookcritics.org) There were also prizes outside the six core categories. The John Leonard Prize for a first book went to Joe Sacco’s *The Once and Future Riot*, and the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize went to *There’s a Monster Behind the Door*, written by Gaëlle Bélem and translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert. (bookcritics.org) The honorary awards were pointed too. Frances FitzGerald received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, while National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service shared the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, linking the ceremony to criticism, journalism, and public culture rather than just book marketing. (bookcritics.org) Put the list together and a clear reading map appears: one winning book revisits a massacre on Jeju Island, one investigates the most talked-about artificial intelligence company in the world, and one turns inward to family history. Critics did not rally around one mood in 2026; they picked memory, power, and self-examination across three different continents. (bookcritics.org, abcnews.com)
