NBCC winners named
The National Book Critics Circle Award winners include Han Kang’s We Do Not Part for fiction, Karen Hao’s Empire of AI for nonfiction, and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me for autobiography — a tidy list to consider if you’re curating a reading queue from prize winners. (blog.abc.nl).
A prize chosen by working critics, not by writers or publishers, just handed fiction to Han Kang, nonfiction to Karen Hao, and autobiography to Arundhati Roy at the National Book Critics Circle Awards announced on March 26 at the New School in New York. (bookcritics.org) That setup is what makes this list worth watching: the National Book Critics Circle says its awards are judged by critics and review editors, and Publishers Weekly reported that this year’s volunteer judges considered about 1,000 books. (bookcritics.org) (publishersweekly.com) Han Kang won fiction for *We Do Not Part*, the English-language edition translated from Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The National Book Critics Circle tied the novel directly to the Jeju Massacre of 1948 and 1949, calling it a book about trauma, loss, and truth. (bookcritics.org) Karen Hao won general nonfiction for *Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI*, which puts one of the biggest technology companies in the world inside a prize list usually dominated by history, biography, and literary reportage. The National Book Critics Circle described Hao’s book as a story about altruistic language turning into a scramble for dominance built on exploitative labor. (bookcritics.org) Arundhati Roy won autobiography for *Mother Mary Comes to Me*, and the judges framed it as a memoir about Roy building a life first as an architecture student and then as a writer while circling back to her mother. That puts one of the most politically recognizable novelists in English on the winner’s list for life writing rather than fiction. (bookcritics.org) The rest of the slate filled in the shape of the year: Alex Green won biography for *A Perfect Turmoil*, Kevin Young won poetry for *Night Watch*, and Quinn Slobodian won criticism for *Hayek’s Bastards*. Nicholas Boggs took the John Leonard Prize for first book with *Baldwin: A Love Story*, and Neige Sinno’s *Sad Tiger*, translated by Natasha Lehrer, won the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. (bookcritics.org) (bookriot.com) The ceremony also came with a defensive mood about who gets to cover books at all. National Book Critics Circle president Adam Dalva said the awards arrived in a moment when “the very concept of the free press is under attack,” and Publishers Weekly said speakers repeatedly referenced the recent closure of The Washington Post’s books section and the fight between artificial intelligence companies and publishers. (bookcritics.org) (publishersweekly.com) So the winners were not just a reading list. They were a snapshot of what critics wanted to elevate in 2025 publishing: historical violence in Korea, power and labor inside artificial intelligence, and a memoir by a novelist long associated with political argument and public dissent. (bookcritics.org) (publishersweekly.com)
