NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE ANNOUNCES WINNERS FOR PUBLISHING YEAR 2025
Kevin Young, Arundhati Roy, Karen Hao among award winners; PBS and NPR honored with the Toni Morrison Achievement Award
New York, NY (March 26, 2026) — Tonight at the New School, the National Book Critics Circle announced the recipients of its book awards for publishing year 2025 and bestowed achievement awards on Frances FitzGerald, NPR, and PBS, among other honors. As NBCC President Adam Dalva declared in his opening remarks, this year’s NBCC Awards are marked by a moment when “the very concept of the free press is under attack. And yet here we are, defiantly carrying on the NBCC’s mission: to seek the right for our members, and for critics around the world, to think freely. To never be afraid to voice their opinions, even in these turbulent times.”
This year’s NBCC winners include books on timely and timeless topics: the present and future impact of new technologies, the power of storytelling in shaping a life, the importance of shining a light on forgotten or ignored histories, the lasting repercussions of sexual abuse, the complexity of geopolitics, the beauty of transformative narratives.
The Nobel laureate Han Kang won the fiction award for We Do Not Part, translated from the Korean by e.yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. As committee chair Heather Scott Partington declared, Kang’s novel presents “a work of blinding melancholy, bleak weather, and murmuring syntax. It is a subtly rendered sketch of trauma in the wake of the Jeju Massacre and a rumination on creation and truth amidst loss. This artful novel lingers like an atmospheric and arresting dream.”
Karen Hao won the nonfiction award for Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, “a gripping tale in which there are no heroes, not even tragic ones,” as committee chair Christoph Irmscher stated. Hao’s work convincingly shows “how altruistic ideas turned into a naked quest for dominance, reliant on networks of exploitative labor,” creating “what Hao identifies as one of the biggest threats facing us today.”
As autobiography chair Grace Talusan stated, “Each year, we recognize outstanding memoirs and autobiographies that illuminate the beautiful, painful truths about being human.” This year Arundhati Roy won the autobiography award for Mother Mary Comes to Me, “an intimate memoir that journeys far away in place and time as Roy creates a life for herself, first as an architecture student and then as a writer, while concurrently tracing her revolutions around the sun, her mother.”
The biography award went to Alex Green, author of A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled. As chair Iris Jamahl Dunkle stated, Green’s “well researched biography brings back a story that had been hidden in the archives for a century,” telling the story of a doctor “who transformed our understanding of disabilities in ways that continue to influence our views today. But as Green reveals, Fernald was a complex character whose legacy is both inspiring and troubling.”
Quinn Slobodian won the criticism award for Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. As committee co-chair Jonathan Leal stated, Slobodian’s work “offers an incisive critique of the encroachment, by neoliberals and the American right, of the social sciences from their purported End of History to the present.”
The winner for poetry was Kevin Young for Night Watch. As committee chair David Woo observed, “the exquisite lyrical beauty of Night Watch depicts the slowly advancing night as counterpart and complement to the light of life and day, where the shadowy impositions of race, affliction, and the afterlife become the illumination we seek, the beautifully shimmering clarities of ‘this errant unebbing life.’”
The Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, which honors both the author and translator, went to Natasha Lehrer’s translation from the French of Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno. As committee chair Mandana Chaffa remarked, Sinno’s memoir offers “a momentous weaving of Sinno’s memories of the horrific acts done to her as a child by her stepfather. Breaking her silence—both in a public trial and in this book—underscores the power of speech, and the importance of shining light on what must be changed.”
Nicholas Boggs won the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book for Baldwin: A Love Story. As committee co-chairs Rebecca Hussey and Rebecca Morgan Frank stated, “Bogg’s beautiful and riveting biography of James Baldwin explores the work and life of this American icon through fresh research and the revelatory frame of four key personal and creative relationships: painters Beauford Delaney and Lucien Happersberger, actor Engin Cezzar, and artist Yoran Cazac.”
The NBCC Service Award went to Elizabeth Taylor, longtime literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, the chair of several Pulitzer juries, and the first sitting NBCC board member to receive the award. In his remarks, NBCC President Adam Dalva praised Taylor’s “sharp mind, kindness, grace, generosity, discretion, and outside the box thinking,” and highlighted her founding of the NBCC Emerging Critics fellowships, which have helped “create a generation of new, outstanding critics.”
The recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to an NBCC member for exceptional critical work, was Rhoda Feng, previously a finalist for the award. Co-chair Lauren LeBlanc lauded Feng’s “nimble and incisive prose” and her ability to bring “her keen intellect to bear through lucid prose that situates her subjects within their larger cultural context.”
The recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award was Frances FitzGerald. As Life Achievement Awards Committee chair Jacob M. Appel declared, “Starting in 1972 with Fire in the Lake, the first serious work of American literature to stem from our military excursion in Southeast Asia, FitzGerald has never been afraid to speak truth to power or to challenge the received wisdom.” Elizabeth Taylor accepted the award on Fitzgerald’s behalf and read from her prepared remarks, including noting that the wide-range of past honorees marks the award as one that “celebrates all things that make literature possible.”
The Toni Morrison Achievement Award, which honors institutions that have made significant contributions to book culture, was jointly awarded to NPR and PBS. As Appel stated, “At a time when some question the value of public, service-minded media, we salute PBS and NPR for all you have done for both book culture and American democracy.” NPR’s Vice President of Cultural Programming Yolanda Sangweni accepted the award in person, and Sylvia Bugg, Chief Programming Executive and General Manager for PBS, accepted via video, noting that “We want to awaken curiosity, to make someone lean forward and think ‘I want to know more’…[stories have] the power to change how we see the world and each other.”
As NBCC President Adam Dalva asserted, “When done well, criticism allows for the kind of slow thinking that creates new networks of thought. This kind of deliberation feeds into culture, politics, and life. The more we write, the more change we can enact, creatively and practically.”
National Book Critics Circle Winners
Publishing Year 2025
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)
BIOGRAPHY
A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, by Alex Green (Bellevue Literary Press)
CRITICISM
Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian (Zone Books)
FICTION
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth)
NONFICTION
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, by Karen Hao (Penguin Press)
POETRY
Night Watch, by Kevin Young (Knopf)
BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION PRIZE
Sad Tiger, by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer (Seven Stories) (Nonfiction)
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (Nonfiction)
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
PBS and NPR