The National Book Critics Circle announced the winners of its book awards Thursday evening in a ceremony at the New School in New York City. The fiction winner was Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad (Knopf); the nonfiction winner was Isabel Wilkerson for The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Random House); and the biography winner was Sarah Bakewell, who wrote How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Other Press).
The poetry prize went to C. D. Wright for One with Others: [a little book of her days] (Copper Canyon); the criticism prize to Clare Cavanagh for Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale Univ.); and the autobiography prize to Darin Strauss for Half a Life (McSweeney’s).
As was previously announced, PW editor Parul Sehgal won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award went to Dalkey Archive Press.