NBCC winners announced

The National Book Critics Circle gave its 2025 book awards on March 26 at the New School in New York, and the fiction prize went to Han Kang for *We Do Not Part*, adding another major U.S. critics’ award to the South Korean writer’s post-Nobel run. (bookcritics.org) The National Book Critics Circle is not a sales prize or a reader-voted list. It is an organization of working critics, and its annual awards cover six core categories: fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry, and criticism. (bookcritics.org) That setup is why these awards can feel like a map of what reviewers, not just publishers or prize juries, kept returning to over the past year. The group also names a first-book winner and a translation winner, so the list often catches books that are still building an audience. (bookcritics.org) In nonfiction, the prize went to Karen Hao for *Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI*. A critics’ award landing on a book about OpenAI, Sam Altman, and artificial intelligence shows how fast tech power has moved into the center of the general nonfiction conversation. (bookcritics.org) In autobiography, Arundhati Roy won for *Mother Mary Comes to Me*, while in biography Kevin Young won for *James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations*. That put one of India’s best-known novelists and one of America’s best-known literary curators on the same winners list. (bookcritics.org) The poetry prize went to Danez Smith for *Bluff*, and the criticism prize went to Becca Rothfeld for *All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess*. Those are the two categories that most clearly show the Circle still treats criticism itself as part of literary culture, not just a service industry around books. (bookcritics.org) The first-book award, called the John Leonard Prize, went to Alexander Sammartino for *Last Acts*. The translation prize, now named the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, went to *Reservoir Bitches* by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary. (bookcritics.org) The ceremony also handed out career honors, which helps explain why the event carries weight beyond one night’s winners. Historian and journalist Frances FitzGerald received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and PBS and NPR received the Toni Morrison Achievement Award. (bookcritics.org) This year’s finalists had been announced on January 20, with 30 books across the six main categories plus the first-book and translation lists. By the time the winners arrived in late March, the awards had already narrowed the field of “books people should catch up on” into a much shorter stack. (bookcritics.org) That is why the National Book Critics Circle list tends to linger after the ceremony. A book that wins here has already survived months of reviewing, argument, and comparison, which is why the March 26 results are likely to shape syllabi, bookstore tables, and year-end “best of the decade” conversations long after spring prize season ends. (publishersweekly.com)