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
2007 Winners & Finalists
Fiction Winner
- Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
Fiction Finalists
- Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
- Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men (Dial Press)
- Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco)
- Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster)
General Nonfiction Winner
- Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)
General Nonfiction Finalists
- Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism (Hill & Wang)
- Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press)
- Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (Doubleday)
- Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne (BKs/St. Martin’s)
Biography Winner
- Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)
Biography Finalists
- Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (Knopf)
- Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison (Knopf)
- John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf)
- Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (Penguin Press)
Autobiography
- Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
Autobiography/Memoir Finalists
- Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
- Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco)
- Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
- Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia (Random House)
Poetry Winner
- Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)
Poetry Finalists
- Matthea Harvey, Modern Life (Graywolf)
- Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking (Flood)
- Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood)
- Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems (Archipelago)
Criticism Winner
- Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Criticism Finalists
- Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon)
- Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quniceanera (Viking)
- Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream (Metropolitan/Holt)
- Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner
- Sam Anderson
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists
- Brooke Allen
- Ron Charles
- Walter Kirn
- Adam Kirsch
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
- Emilie Buchwald