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
2006 Winners & Finalists
Fiction Winner
- Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
Fiction Finalists
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
- Dave Eggers, What Is the What (McSweeney’s)
- Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)
General Nonfiction Winner
- Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
General Nonfiction Finalists
- Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
- Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
- Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
- Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)
Biography Winner
- Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin’s Press)
Biography Finalists
- Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
- Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
- Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
- Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)
Autobiography/Memoir Winner
- Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
Autobiography/Memoir Finalists
- Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
- Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
- Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Poetry Winner
- Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House)
Poetry Finalists
- Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh Press)
- Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
- Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)
Criticism Winner
- Lawrence Weschler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney’s)
Criticism Finalists
- Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within (Doubleday)
- Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
- Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon (Viking)
- Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner
- Steven G. Kellman
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists
- Ron Charles
- Kathryn Harrison
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus
- Donna Rifkind
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
- John Leonard