In these fraught times, some good news. So pleased to announce the winners of the National Book Critics Circle awards for the publishing year 2019. Normally board members meet in person in New York the morning of the awards ceremony to choose the winners, who they celebrate in the evening. But these are not normal times.
And so the board—including me—met by online conferencing, and debated and argued and voted for five hours.
The winners are:
Autobiography: Chanel Miller, "Know My Name" (Viking) The memoir of a young woman who was raped by a student at Stanford University, and the aftermath.
Biography: Josh Levin, "The Queen" (Little, Brown), the biography of Linda Taylor, a grifter who became known as the original welfare queen.
Criticism: Saidiya Hartman, "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval" (W.W. Norton).
Fiction: Edwidge Danticat, "Everything Inside," a collection of stories
Nonfiction: Patrick Radden Keefe, "Say Nothing: The True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" (Doubleday).
