NBCC winners named
The National Book Critics Circle announced winners this spring with Han Kang’s We Do Not Part taking fiction, Karen Hao’s Empire of AI winning nonfiction, and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me winning autobiography. Those choices give a quick snapshot of what critics are elevating this season — literary fiction, tech-focused nonfiction, and high-profile nonfiction memoir — and can hint at which books will dominate discussion lists and reading groups. If you follow prize-driven discovery, this tells you where reviewers’ attention is concentrated right now. (blog.abc.nl)
The National Book Critics Circle handed one of its biggest fiction prizes to a translated novel about a mass killing on Jeju Island, and one of its biggest nonfiction prizes to a book about OpenAI. That pairing tells you a lot about what American critics were rewarding on March 26, 2026: historical trauma on one side, and the power struggle around artificial intelligence on the other. (bookcritics.org) The group is not a publisher or a bookstore chain. The National Book Critics Circle is a critics’ organization that gives annual awards for books published in English in categories including fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, poetry, and criticism. (bookcritics.org) Its 2026 awards covered books from publishing year 2025, which is why the official announcement uses both dates at once. The ceremony took place in Manhattan on March 26, 2026, but the books honored were the previous year’s releases. (bookcritics.org, publishersweekly.com) In fiction, the winner was Han Kang’s *We Do Not Part*, translated from Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The book centers on the 1948 to 1949 Jeju uprising and the thousands of people killed there, so the award also put a translator-led English edition at the center of the U.S. spring book conversation. (bookcritics.org, usnews.com) In nonfiction, the winner was Karen Hao’s *Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI*. The judges said the book tracks how ideas presented as altruistic became a drive for dominance built on exploitative labor networks, which is a sharper and more political choice than a plain business biography of the artificial intelligence boom. (bookcritics.org) In autobiography, the winner was Arundhati Roy’s *Mother Mary Comes to Me*. The judges described it as an intimate memoir that follows Roy from architecture student to writer while circling back to her mother, which helps explain why it landed in autobiography rather than criticism or essays. (bookcritics.org) The rest of the slate filled out the same picture of critics leaning toward argument-heavy and history-heavy books. Alex Green won biography for *A Perfect Turmoil*, Quinn Slobodian won criticism for *Hayek’s Bastards*, and Kevin Young won poetry for *Stones*. (bookcritics.org, publishersmarketplace.com) There were also honors outside the competitive book categories. Frances FitzGerald received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service shared the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. (bookcritics.org, usnews.com) So if you use prizes as a map for what will keep showing up in reviews, book clubs, and bookstore tables, this year’s map is unusually clear. A Korean novel about state violence, a reported book about Sam Altman’s OpenAI, and a memoir by Arundhati Roy are now carrying the National Book Critics Circle label into the rest of 2026. (bookcritics.org, libraryjournal.com)
