Here are the finalists for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Yesterday, writer and book critic Michael Schaub announced all the finalists for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, which honors the “finest books” published in English during the last year. The thirty finalists were selected across six categories—Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry—by a distinguished panel of literary experts.
Seven finalists were also selected for the John Leonard Prize, which awards for the best debut in any genre. Previous winners include Sarah M. Broom, Tommy Orange, and Carmen Maria Machado.
The winner of each category will be announced live at the virtual National Book Critics Circle Award on Thursday March 25 at 7pm at wildboundlive.com. The free public event will also grant the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award to the NYC nonprofit Feminist Press, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing to the New Republic critic Jo Livingstone.
A hearty congrats to all!
*
Finalists for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Shayla Lawson, This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope
Riva Lehrer, Golem Girl
Wayétu Moore, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women
Alia Volz, Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco
BIOGRAPHY
Amy Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Les Payne, Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s
CRITICISM
Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces
Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country
Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader
Wendy A. Woloson, Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America
FICTION
Martin Amis, Inside Story
Randall Kenan, If I Had Two Wings
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet
Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife
Bryan Washington, Memorial
NONFICTION
Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St, Louis and the Violent History of the United States
James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent
Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire
POETRY
Victoria Chang, Obit
Francine J. Harris, Here Is The Sweet Hand
Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Imperial Liquor
Chris Nealon, The Shore
Danez Smith, Homie
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
Kerri Arsenault, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans
Raven Leilani, Luster
Megha Majumdar, A Burning
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
Brandon Taylor, Real Life
C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold
[h/t NBCC]
