The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awards have been announced. The NBCC honours outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature.

Here is the complete list of NBCC Award finalists for the publishing year 2017:

Fiction

• Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
• The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott
• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
• Improvement by Joan Silber
• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Non-fiction

• The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea by Jack E. Davis
• The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald
• The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen
• Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford

Autobiography

• The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui
• Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
• Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon by Henry Marsh
• The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (translated by Anna Summers)
• Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China by Xiaolu Guo

Biography

• Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser
• The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon
• The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek by Howard Markel
• Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman
• Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Kenneth Whyte

Criticism

• You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages by Carina Chocano
• The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat
• Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History by Camille T. Dungy
• Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli
• Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News by Kevin Young

Poetry

• Fourth Person Singular by Nuar Alsadir
• Earthling by James Longenbach
• Whereas by Layli Long Soldier
• The Darkness of Snow by Frank Ormsby
• Directions for Use by Ana Ristović (translated by Steven Teref & Maja Teref)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing

Charles Finch

Finalists: David Biespiel, Maureen Corrigan, Ruth Franklin & James Marcus

John Leonard Prize (for best debut novel)

Carmen Maria Machado for Her Body and Other Parties

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award

John McPhee

Winners of the National Book Critics Circle awards will be announced on 15 March. Find out more about the NBCC here.