Frances FitzGerald to receive lifetime achievement award
New York, NY (Tuesday, January 20)—Today, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists in six categories – Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry – as well as the finalists for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the John Leonard Prize. The winners will be named on March 26 at a ceremony open to the public, during which the NBCC will also honor acclaimed historian and journalist Frances FitzGerald with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award; Rhoda Feng with the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing; and Elizabeth Taylor with the NBCC Service Award. The Toni Morrison Achievement Award (winner to be announced) will also be presented at the ceremony.
“The NBCC is delighted to announce our 2025 shortlists. Out of the many hundreds of titles that our organization carefully considered this year, these singular and striking finalists rose to the top,” says NBCC President Adam Dalva. “Each of these books is an artistic achievement. They interrogate the lives we lead, broaden our creative and social horizons, move us, and continually surprise us. Especially in this difficult time, every one of these writers and translators deserves to be celebrated – and to be widely read.”
The 42 shortlisted books were published by 30 different presses/imprints; they represent a remarkable breadth of work, as expressed by the committee chairs for each category. The Autobiography shortlist presents “profoundly moving books, each an astonishment in its own way,” states Grace Talusan; the Biography finalists, as Iris Jamahl Dunkle says, “have each written exquisite books that elevate the voices of subjects that need our attention.” Christoph Irmscher calls the Nonfiction finalists “expansive, uncompromising, morally clear-eyed, impeccably-researched as well as masterfully written,” and the Criticism shortlist, as co-chairs Jonathan Leal and J. Howard Rosier affirm, “illuminate the present with the urgency, context, and creativity it demands.” The poetry finalists “represent the summit of contemporary achievement in the genre,” says David Woo, and the Fiction list, as Heather Scott Partington expresses, “comprises exquisite ontological works of memory, interdependence, trauma, and power that ask us to contemplate what we inherit and what we owe.”
The two named prizes – the Barrios and Leonard – celebrate the best books in translation and the best first books in any category, respectively. As Mandana Chaffa describes, the Barrios shortlist features “remarkable books by notable authors, which are only available to English readers because of the gifted translators and committed publishers who bring them to life.” Co-chairs Rebecca Morgan Frank and Rebecca Hussey call the Leonard Prize list “a vibrant range of debuts across genres, including a fresh Baldwin biography, an investigation into Spotify’s influence, and novels set in a boxing gym in Texas and a care home in Japan.”
Alongside the book prizes, the NBCC also confers special awards each year. This year, the NBCC bestows the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award on Frances FitzGerald, “a fearless journalist, rigorous historian, discerning cultural critic, and pathbreaking political analyst who has challenged received wisdom and spoken truth to power for sixty years,” as Sandrof Chair Jacob Appel states. “With an unflinching eye and an unsparing pen, FitzGerald writes with a moral clarity that slices through the illusions of our age.”
The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing goes to Rhoda Feng, whose “confidence as a nimble and erudite reviewer for multiple publications, in formats that range in length, struck us as exceptional,” says Lauren LeBlanc. As co-chair Colette Bancroft adds, “Perhaps her most notable trait is her astonishing range, and the care and craft she brings to whatever she turns her eye upon.”
Finally, this year’s Service Award goes to former NBCC President and Chicago Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor, who has, as Jacob Appel declares, “championed the wellbeing of book critics for more than a quarter century with matchless generosity and grace. As the founder of the NBCC’s Emerging Critics fellowship, Taylor has fostered the careers of an entire generation of younger critics.” The Toni Morrison Achievement Award winner will be named at a later date.
Founded in 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel, the NBCC presented its first awards the following year; today, the NBCC Awards continue to be among the most prestigious honors in American letters, and are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book review editors. The awards for publishing year 2025 will be presented on Thursday, March 26 at the New School in New York City. The finalists’ reading will be the night before, on March 25; both the readings and the award ceremony will be livestreamed on the NBCC’s YouTube channel.
National Book Critics Circle Finalists
Publishing Year 2025
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Memorial Days, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)
Paper Girl, by Beth Macy (Penguin Press)
Shattered, by Hanif Kureishi (Ecco)
A Truce That Is Not Peace, by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)
BIOGRAPHY
Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, by Mayukh Sen (W.W Norton)
A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, by Alex Green (Bellevue Literary Press)
Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution, by Amanda Vaill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore, by Ashley D. Farmer (Pantheon)
Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, by Carla Kaplan (Harper)
CRITICISM
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)
Greyhound, by Joanna Pocock (Soft Skull Press)
Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian (Zone Books)
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Harvard University Press)
FICTION
The Antidote, by Karen Russell (Knopf)
Audition, by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)
On the Calculation of Volume (Book III), by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions)
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth)
The Wilderness, by Angela Flournoy (Mariner)
NONFICTION
America, América: A New History of the New World, by Greg Grandin (Penguin Press)
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins, by Barbara Demick (Random House)
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, by Karen Hao (Penguin Press)
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation, by Scott Anderson (Doubleday)
No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, by Gardiner Harris (Random House)
POETRY
Chronicle of Drifting, by Yuki Tanaka (Copper Canyon)
Death of the First Idea, by Rickey Laurentiis (Knopf)
Night Watch, by Kevin Young (Knopf)
The Other Love, by Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Unravel, by Tolu Oloruntoba (McClelland & Stewart)
BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION PRIZE
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions) (Nonfiction)
Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories) (Fiction)
Near Distance, by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen (Biblioasis) (Fiction)
Sad Tiger, by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer (Seven Stories) (Nonfiction)
The Frog in the Throat, by Markus Werner, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (NYRB Classics) (Fiction)
The Wax Child, by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (New Directions) (Fiction)
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (Nonfiction)
Crown, by Evanthia Bromiley (Grove) (Fiction)
Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Hogarth) (Fiction)
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly (Atria/One Signal) (Nonfiction)
Salvage, by Hedgie Choi (University of Wisconsin Press) (Poetry)
The Slip, by Lucas Schaefer (Simon & Schuster) (Fiction)
NBCC SERVICE AWARD
Elizabeth Taylor
NONA BALAKIAN CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN REVIEWING
Winner: Rhoda Feng
Finalists: Edna Bonhomme, Priscilla Gilman, Julia Klein, James Marcus
IVAN SANDROF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Frances FitzGerald
TONI MORRISON ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
To be announced