Each year, the National Book Critics Circle presents awards for the finest books published in English in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Poetry, and Criticism.
The National Book Critics Circle Award
1983 Winners & Finalists
Fiction Winner
- William Kennedy, Ironweed (The Viking Press)
Fiction Finalists
- Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Raymond Carver, Cathedral (Knopf)
- Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen (Harper & Row)
- Ron Loewinsohn, Magnetic Field(s) (Knopf)
General Nonfiction Winner
- Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (Summit Books)
General Nonfiction Finalists
- Roger Rosenblatt, Children of War (Anchor/Doubleday)
- William W. Warner, Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
- Theodore Draper, Present History: On Nuclear War, Detente and Other Controversies (Random House)
- David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press)
Biography/Autobiography Winner
- Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters (Houghton Mifflin)
Biography/Autobiography Finalists
- Kenneth R. Manning, Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just (Oxford University Press)
- Nicholas Gage, Eleni (Random House)
- E. Fuller Torrey, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeth’s (McGraw-Hill)
- Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle (Cornell University Press)
Poetry Winner
- James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (Atheneum)
Poetry Finalists
- Jorie Graham, Erosion (Princeton University Press)
- Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher (Knopf)
- Cathy Song, Picture Bride (Yale University Press)
- C.K. Williams, Tar (Random House)
Criticism Winner
- John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (Knopf)
Criticism Finalists
- John Rockwell, All American Music (Knopf)
- Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor: Essays (Knopf)
- Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press)
- Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Harvard University Press)