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
2008 Winners & Finalists
Fiction Winner
- Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Fiction Finalists
- Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
- M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (West Virginia University Press)
- Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge (Random House)
General Nonfiction Winner
- Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (Knopf)
General Nonfiction Finalists
- Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War (Knopf)
- Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (Doubleday)
- Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (Atlantic)
- George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University Press)
Biography Winner
- Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Knopf)
Biography Finalists
- Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (Amistad/Knopf)
- Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century (Penguin Press)
- Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)
- Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf)
Autobiography
- Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin)
Autobiography/Memoir Finalists
- Rick Bass, Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin)
- Helene Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach (Simon and Schuster)
- Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter (W.W. Norton)
- Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven (Harmony Books)
Poetry Winners
- Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
- August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Poetry Finalists
- Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
- Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
- Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark With Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)
Criticism Winner
- Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press)
Criticism Finalists
- Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books)
- Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life (Boston Review/MIT)
- Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (Doubleday)
- Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (University of Michigan Press)
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner
- Ron Charles
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists
- Michael Antman
- Kathryn Harrison
- Laila Lalami
- Todd Shy
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
- PEN American Center