NBCC winners named

The National Book Critics Circle just handed one of its top fiction prizes to a translated novel about a mass killing on Jeju Island, not to a buzzy American debut or a celebrity book. Han Kang’s *We Do Not Part*, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, won fiction at the March 26 ceremony in Manhattan. (publishersweekly.com) The National Book Critics Circle is a critics’ organization, not a publisher or bookstore chain, and it has given annual awards since the 1970s to books published in English in the United States. Its awards are decided by reviewers and critics, which makes them a snapshot of what professional readers think held up over a full year. (bookcritics.org) (bookbrowse.com) This year’s fiction winner came with extra weight because Han Kang is already one of the most closely watched novelists in world literature. Coverage of the award noted that *We Do Not Part* centers on the 1948-1949 Jeju uprising, when thousands of people were killed on the South Korean island. (usnews.com) The nonfiction prize went to Karen Hao for *Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI*, which puts one of the biggest technology stories of the decade into the same awards conversation as literary fiction and memoir. Kirkus described the book through the judges’ citation as a “gripping tale” about artificial intelligence and OpenAI rather than a triumphalist business story. (kirkusreviews.com) The autobiography winner was Arundhati Roy’s *Mother Mary Comes to Me*, giving the awards one more internationally known name with a very different kind of book. Roy is best known to many readers for novels and political essays, so a memoir winning here pulls her personal history into the center of the season. (kirkusreviews.com) (scroll.in) The rest of the winners fill out the picture of what critics were rewarding across the 2025 publishing year. Alex Green won biography for *A Perfect Turmoil*, Quinn Slobodian won criticism for *Hayek’s Bastards*, and Kevin Young won poetry for *Stone Poems*. (publishersmarketplace.com) Put together, the list is strikingly international and unusually current at the same time: a Korean novel in translation, a book about OpenAI, and a memoir by an Indian writer with a global readership. That mix makes the awards feel less like a single trend and more like a map of what critics thought serious reading looked like in 2026. (publishersweekly.com) (publishingperspectives.com)