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
2011 Winners & Finalists
Fiction Winner
- Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)
Fiction Finalists
- Teju Cole, Open City (Random House)
- Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Knopf)
- Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner)
General Nonfiction Winner
- Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (Knopf)
General Nonfiction Finalists
- Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random)
- James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon)
- Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)
Biography Winner
- John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press)
Biography Finalists
- Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution (Little, Brown)
- Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 (Knopf)
- Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking)
- Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)
Autobiography
- Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (Free Press)
Autobiography/Memoir Finalists
- Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing (W.W. Norton)
- Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (Little, Brown)
- Luis J. Rodríguez, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone)
- Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Henry Holt)
Poetry Winner
- Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press)
Poetry Finalists
- Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions)
- Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions)
- Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
- Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)
Criticism Winner
- Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf)
Criticism Finalists
- David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber)
- Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday)
- Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture (Open Letter)
- Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University of Minnesota Press)
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner
- Kathryn Schulz
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists
- William Deresiewicz
- Ruth Franklin
- Garth Risk Hallberg
- Kathryn Harrison
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
- Robert B. Silvers