National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, established in 1975, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English."^[1] Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism.

Books previously published in English are not eligible, such as re-issues and paperback editions. They do consider "translations, short story and essay collections, self published books, and any titles that fall under the general categories."^[2]

The judges are the volunteer directors of the NBCC who are 24 members serving rotating three-year terms, with eight elected annually by the voting members, namely "professional book review editors and book reviewers."^[3] Winners of the awards are announced each year at the NBCC awards ceremony in conjunction with the yearly membership meeting, which takes place in March.^[2]

Recipients

National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism winners and finalists

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1975	Paul Fussell	The Great War and Modern Memory	Winner
1976	Bruno Bettelheim	The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales	Winner
	Ada Louise Huxtable	Kicked a Building Lately?
	Steven Marcus	Representations: Essays on Literature and Society
	Charles Rosen	Arnold Schoenberg
	E.B. White, ed. by Dorothy Lobrano Guth	Letters of E.B. White
1977	Susan Sontag	On Photography	Winner
	Arlene Croce	Afterimages
	Morris Dickstein	Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties
	Richard Poirier	Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing
	Gore Vidal	Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays, 1973-1976
1978	Meyer Schapiro	Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (Selected Papers, Volume 2)	Winner
	Malcolm Cowley	And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade: Chapters of Literary History, 1918-1978
	Eudora Welty	The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews
	Edward W. Said	Orientalism
	William H. Gass	The World Within the Word: Essays
1979	Elaine Pagels	The Gnostic Gospels	Winner
	Frances FitzGerald	America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century
	Richard Gilman	Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet
	Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar	The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
	Robert Alter with Carol Cosman	A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal
1980	Helen Vendler	Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets	Winner
	Paul Fussell	Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars
	R.P. Blackmur, ed. by Veronica A. Makowsky	Henry Adams
	Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Fredson Bowers	Lectures on Literature
	Barbara Novak	Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875
1981	Virgil Thomson	A Virgil Thomson Reader	Winner
	Guy Davenport	The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays
	Martin Gardner	Science: Good, Bad and Bogus
	Edward Mendelson	Early Auden
	Thomas G. Bergin	Boccaccio
1982	Gore Vidal	The Second American Revolution and Other Essays	Winner
1983	John Updike	Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism	Winner
1984	Robert Hass	Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry	Winner
1985	William H. Gass	Habitations of the Word: Essays	Winner
1986	Joseph Brodsky	Less Than One: Selected Essays	Winner
1987	Edwin Denby	Dance Writings	Winner
1988	Clifford Geertz	Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author	Winner
1989	John Clive	Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History	Winner
1990	Arthur C. Danto	Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present	Winner
1991	Lawrence L. Langer	Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory	Winner
1992	Garry Wills	Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America	Winner
1993	John Dizikes	Opera in America: A Cultural History	Winner
1994	Gerald Early	The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture	Winner
1995	Robert Darnton	The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France	Winner
1996	William H. Gass	Finding a Form	Winner
1997	Mario Vargas Llosa	Making Waves	Winner
1998	Gary Giddins	Visions of Jazz: The First Century	Winner
1999	Jorge Luis Borges	Selected Non-Fictions	Winner
2000	Cynthia Ozick	Quarrel & Quandary	Winner
2001	Martin Amis	The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000	Winner
2002	William H. Gass	Tests of Time	Winner
2003	Rebecca Solnit	River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West	Winner
	Dagoberto Gilb	Gritos	Finalist
	Nick Hornby	Songbook
	Ross King	Michelangelo & the Popes Ceiling
	Susan Sontag	Regarding the Pain of Others
2004	Patrick Neate	Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet	Winner
	Richard Howard	Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003	Finalist	[4]
	Graham Robb	Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century
	Craig Seligman	Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me
	James Wood	The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel
2005	William Logan	The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin	Winner	[5]
	Hal Crowther	Gather at the River: Notes From the Post-Millennial South	Finalist	[6]
	Arthur Danto	Unnatural Wonders
	John Updike	Still Looking: Essays on American Art
	Eliot Weinberger	What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles
2006	Lawrence Weschler	Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences	Winner	[7]
	Bruce Bawer	While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within	Finalist
	Frederick Crews	Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
	Daniel Dennett	Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon
	Lia Purpura	On Looking: Essays
2007	Alex Ross	The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century	Winner	[8][9][10]
	Ben Ratliff	Coltrane: The Story of a Sound	Finalist	[11]
	Julia Alvarez	Once Upon a Quniceanera
	Susan Faludi	The Terror Dream
	Joan Acocella	Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints
2008	Seth Lerer	Children's Literature: A Readers' History: Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter	Winner	[12]
	Richard Brody	Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard	Finalist	[13][14]
	Joel L. Kraemer	Maimonides: The Life and World of One Of Civilization's Greatest Minds
	Reginald Shepard	Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry
	Vivian Gornick	The Men in My Life
2009	Eula Biss	Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays	Winner	[15][16][17]
	Stephen Burt	Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry	Finalist	[15]
	Morris Dickstein	Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
	David Hajdu	Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture
	Greg Milner	Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
2010	Clare Cavanagh	Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West	Winner	[18][19]
	Susie Linfield	The Cruel Radiance	Finalist	[20]
	Elif Batuman	The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
	Terry Castle	The Professor and Other Writings
	Ander Monson	Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir
2011	Geoff Dyer	Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews	Winner	[21][22]
	David Bellos	Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything	Finalist	[23][24][22]
	Dubravka Ugresic	Karaoke Culture: Essays
	Ellen Willis	Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
	Jonathan Lethem	The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
2012	Marina Warner	Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights	Winner	[25][26]
	Mary Ruefle	Madness, Rack, and Honey	Finalist	[27][28][25]
	Paul Elie	Reinventing Bach
	Kevin Young	The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
	Daniel Mendelsohn	Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
2013	Franco Moretti	Distant Reading	Winner	[29][30]
	Mary Beard	Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations	Finalist	[31][32]
	Janet Malcolm	Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
	Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlman	The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus
	Hilton Als	White Girls
2014	Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz	The Essential Ellen Willis	Winner	[33][34]
	Claudia Rankine	Citizen: An American Lyric	Finalist	[35][36]
	Vikram Chandra	Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
	Eula Biss	On Immunity: An Inoculation
	Lynne Tillman	What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
2015	Maggie Nelson	The Argonauts	Winner	[37]
	Ta-Nehisi Coates	Between the World and Me	Finalist	[38]
	Leo Damrosch	Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake
	Colm Tóibín	On Elizabeth Bishop
	James Wood	The Nearest Thing to Life
2016	Carol Anderson	White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide	Winner	[39]
	Mark Greif	Against Everything: Essays	Finalist	[40]
	Peter Orner	Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live
	Alice Kaplan	Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic
	Olivia Laing	The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
2017	Carina Chocano	You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages	Winner	[41][42]
	Kevin Young	Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News	Finalist	[43][44]
	Camille Dungy	Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
	Valeria Luiselli	Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
	Edwidge Danticat	The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
2018	Zadie Smith	Feel Free: Essays	Winner	[45][46][47][48]
	Robert Christgau	Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017	Finalist	[45]
	Lacy M. Johnson	The Reckonings: Essays
	Terrance Hayes	To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight
	Stephen Greenblatt	Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
2019	Saidiya Hartman	Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval	Winner	[49][50]
	Maria Tumarkin	Axiomatic	Finalist	[51]
	Lydia Davis	Essays One
	Hanif Abdurraqib	Go Ahead in the Rain
	Peter Schjeldahl	Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
2020	Nicole R. Fleetwood	Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration	Winner	[52][53][54]
	Wendy A. Woloson	Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America	Finalist	[55]
	Cristina Rivera Garza	Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country
	Namwali Serpell	Stranger Faces
	Vivian Gornick	Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader
2021	Melissa Febos	Girlhood	Winner	[56][57]
	Mark McGurl	Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon	Finalist	[58][59][60]
	Amia Srinivasan	The Right To Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
	Jesse McCarthy	Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays
	Jenny Diski	Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays
2022	Timothy Bewes	Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age	Winner	[61]
	Rachel Aviv	Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us	Finalist	[62]
	Peter Brooks	Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
	Margo Jefferson	Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
	Alia Trabucco Zerán (trans. by Sophie Hughes)	When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold
2023	Tina Post	Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression	Winner	[63]
	Grace Lavery	Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques	Finalist	[64]
	Naomi Klein	Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
	Myriam Gurba	Creep: Accusations and Confessions
	Nicholas Dames	The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century
2024	Hanif Abdurraqib	There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension	Winner	[65][66]
	Legacy Russell	Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us	Finalist	[67]
	Jesse McCarthy	The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War
	Claire Bishop	Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today
	Marianne Brooker	Intervals