The finalists for this year’s National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awards have been announced. The NBCC honours outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature.
Below is the complete list of NBCC Award finalists for the publishing year 2020:
Fiction
- Inside Story by Martin Amis
- If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan
- Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
- How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa
- Memorial by Bryan Washington
Non-fiction
- The Broken Heart of America: St, Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson
- Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future by James Shapiro
- She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs by Sarah Smarsh
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson
- Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire by Tom Zoellner
Autobiography
- Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
- This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope by Shayla Lawson
- Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer
- The Dragons, The Giant, The Women by Wayétu Moore
- Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco by Alia Volz.
Biography
- Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley
- The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary Carter
- Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
- The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne & Tamara Payne
- The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty
Criticism
- Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole Fleetwood
- Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell
- Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza
- Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick
- Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America by Wendy A. Woloson
Poetry
- Obit by Victoria Chan
- Here Is The Sweet Hand by Francine J. Harri
- Imperial Liquor by Amaud Jamaul Johnson
- The Shore by Chris Nealon
- Homie by Danez Smit
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Jo Livingstone
John Leonard Prize (for best debut novel)
- Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains by Kerri Arsenault
- The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Luster by Raven Leilani
- A Burning by Megha Majumdar
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
- Real life by Brandon Taylor
- How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
