# National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, established in 1975, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism.
Books previously published in English are not eligible, such as re-issues and paperback editions. They do consider "translations, short story and essay collections, self published books, and any titles that fall under the general categories."
The judges are the volunteer directors of the NBCC who are 24 members serving rotating three-year terms, with eight elected annually by the voting members, namely "professional book review editors and book reviewers." Winners of the awards are announced each year at the NBCC awards ceremony in conjunction with the yearly membership meeting, which takes place in March.

## Recipients

National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism winners and finalists :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 1975 | Paul Fussell | The Great War and Modern Memory | Winner |
| 1976 | Bruno Bettelheim | The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales | Winner |
| 1977 | Susan Sontag | On Photography | Winner |
| 1978 | Meyer Schapiro | Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (Selected Papers, Volume 2) | Winner |
| 1979 | Elaine Pagels | The Gnostic Gospels | Winner |
| 1980 | Helen Vendler | Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets | Winner |
| 1981 | Virgil Thomson | A Virgil Thomson Reader | Winner |
| 1982 | Gore Vidal | The Second American Revolution and Other Essays | Winner |
| 1983 | John Updike | Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism | Winner |
| 1984 | Robert Hass | Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry | Winner |
| 1985 | William H. Gass | Habitations of the Word: Essays | Winner |
| 1986 | Joseph Brodsky | Less Than One: Selected Essays | Winner |
| 1987 | Edwin Denby | Dance Writings | Winner |
| 1988 | Clifford Geertz | Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author | Winner |
| 1989 | John Clive | Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History | Winner |
| 1990 | Arthur C. Danto | Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present | Winner |
| 1991 | Lawrence L. Langer | Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory | Winner |
| 1992 | Garry Wills | Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America | Winner |
| 1993 | John Dizikes | Opera in America: A Cultural History | Winner |
| 1994 | Gerald Early | The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture | Winner |
| 1995 | Robert Darnton | The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France | Winner |
| 1996 | William H. Gass | Finding a Form | Winner |
| 1997 | Mario Vargas Llosa | Making Waves | Winner |
| 1998 | Gary Giddins | Visions of Jazz: The First Century | Winner |
| 1999 | Jorge Luis Borges | Selected Non-Fictions | Winner |
| 2000 | Cynthia Ozick | Quarrel & Quandary | Winner |
| 2001 | Martin Amis | The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000 | Winner |
| 2002 | William H. Gass | Tests of Time | Winner |
| 2003 | Rebecca Solnit | River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West | Winner |
| 2004 | Patrick Neate | Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet | Winner |
| 2005 | William Logan | The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin | Winner |
| 2005 | Hal Crowther | Gather at the River: Notes From the Post-Millennial South | Finalist |
| 2005 | Arthur Danto | Unnatural Wonders | Finalist |
| 2005 | John Updike | Still Looking: Essays on American Art | Finalist |
| 2005 | Eliot Weinberger | What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles | Finalist |
| 2006 | Lawrence Weschler | Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences | Winner |
| 2006 | Bruce Bawer | While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within | Finalist |
| 2006 | Frederick Crews | Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays | Finalist |
| 2006 | Daniel Dennett | Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon | Finalist |
| 2006 | Lia Purpura | On Looking: Essays | Finalist |
| 2007 | Alex Ross | The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | Winner |
| 2007 | Ben Ratliff | Coltrane: The Story of a Sound | Finalist |
| 2007 | Julia Alvarez | Once Upon a Quniceanera | Finalist |
| 2007 | Susan Faludi | The Terror Dream | Finalist |
| 2007 | Joan Acocella | Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints | Finalist |
| 2008 | Seth Lerer | Children's Literature: A Readers' History: Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter | Winner |
| 2008 | Richard Brody | Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard | Finalist |
| 2008 | Joel L. Kraemer | Maimonides: The Life and World of One Of Civilization's Greatest Minds | Finalist |
| 2008 | Reginald Shepard | Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry | Finalist |
| 2008 | Vivian Gornick | The Men in My Life | Finalist |
| 2009 | Eula Biss | Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays | Winner |
| 2009 | Stephen Burt | Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry | Finalist |
| 2009 | Morris Dickstein | Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression | Finalist |
| 2009 | David Hajdu | Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture | Finalist |
| 2009 | Greg Milner | Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music | Finalist |
| 2010 | Clare Cavanagh | Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West | Winner |
| 2010 | Susie Linfield | The Cruel Radiance | Finalist |
| 2010 | Elif Batuman | The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them | Finalist |
| 2010 | Terry Castle | The Professor and Other Writings | Finalist |
| 2010 | Ander Monson | Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir | Finalist |
| 2011 | Geoff Dyer | Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews | Winner |
| 2011 | David Bellos | Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything | Finalist |
| 2011 | Dubravka Ugresic | Karaoke Culture: Essays | Finalist |
| 2011 | Ellen Willis | Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music | Finalist |
| 2011 | Jonathan Lethem | The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. | Finalist |
| 2012 | Marina Warner | Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights | Winner |
| 2012 | Mary Ruefle | Madness, Rack, and Honey | Finalist |
| 2012 | Paul Elie | Reinventing Bach | Finalist |
| 2012 | Kevin Young | The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness | Finalist |
| 2012 | Daniel Mendelsohn | Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture | Finalist |
| 2013 | Franco Moretti | Distant Reading | Winner |
| 2013 | Mary Beard | Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations | Finalist |
| 2013 | Janet Malcolm | Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers | Finalist |
| 2013 | Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlman | The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus | Finalist |
| 2013 | Hilton Als | White Girls | Finalist |
| 2014 | Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz | The Essential Ellen Willis | Winner |
| 2014 | Claudia Rankine | Citizen: An American Lyric | Finalist |
| 2014 | Vikram Chandra | Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty | Finalist |
| 2014 | Eula Biss | On Immunity: An Inoculation | Finalist |
| 2014 | Lynne Tillman | What Would Lynne Tillman Do? | Finalist |
| 2015 | Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Winner |
| 2015 | Ta-Nehisi Coates | Between the World and Me | Finalist |
| 2015 | Leo Damrosch | Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake | Finalist |
| 2015 | Colm Tóibín | On Elizabeth Bishop | Finalist |
| 2015 | James Wood | The Nearest Thing to Life | Finalist |
| 2016 | Carol Anderson | White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide | Winner |
| 2016 | Mark Greif | Against Everything: Essays | Finalist |
| 2016 | Peter Orner | Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live | Finalist |
| 2016 | Alice Kaplan | Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic | Finalist |
| 2016 | Olivia Laing | The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone | Finalist |
| 2017 | Carina Chocano | You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages | Winner |
| 2017 | Kevin Young | Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News | Finalist |
| 2017 | Camille Dungy | Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History | Finalist |
| 2017 | Valeria Luiselli | Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions | Finalist |
| 2017 | Edwidge Danticat | The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story | Finalist |
| 2018 | Zadie Smith | Feel Free: Essays | Winner |
| 2018 | Robert Christgau | Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017 | Finalist |
| 2018 | Lacy M. Johnson | The Reckonings: Essays | Finalist |
| 2018 | Terrance Hayes | To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight | Finalist |
| 2018 | Stephen Greenblatt | Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics | Finalist |
| 2019 | Saidiya Hartman | Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval | Winner |
| 2019 | Maria Tumarkin | Axiomatic | Finalist |
| 2019 | Lydia Davis | Essays One | Finalist |
| 2019 | Hanif Abdurraqib | Go Ahead in the Rain | Finalist |
| 2019 | Peter Schjeldahl | Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 | Finalist |
| 2020 | Nicole R. Fleetwood | Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration | Winner |
| 2020 | Wendy A. Woloson | Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America | Finalist |
| 2020 | Cristina Rivera Garza | Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country | Finalist |
| 2020 | Namwali Serpell | Stranger Faces | Finalist |
| 2020 | Vivian Gornick | Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader | Finalist |
| 2021 | Melissa Febos | Girlhood | Winner |
| 2021 | Mark McGurl | Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon | Finalist |
| 2021 | Amia Srinivasan | The Right To Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century | Finalist |
| 2021 | Jesse McCarthy | Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays | Finalist |
| 2021 | Jenny Diski | Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays | Finalist |
| 2022 | Timothy Bewes | Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age | Winner |
| 2022 | Rachel Aviv | Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us | Finalist |
| 2022 | Peter Brooks | Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative | Finalist |
| 2022 | Margo Jefferson | Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir | Finalist |
| 2022 | Alia Trabucco Zerán (trans. by Sophie Hughes) | When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold | Finalist |
| 2023 | Tina Post | Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression | Winner |
| 2023 | Grace Lavery | Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques | Finalist |
| 2023 | Naomi Klein | Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World | Finalist |
| 2023 | Myriam Gurba | Creep: Accusations and Confessions | Finalist |
| 2023 | Nicholas Dames | The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century | Finalist |