"The more we write, the more change we can enact, creatively and practically," said NBCC President Adam Dalva
Credit: Dominique Charriau/WireImage; Farrar, Straus and Giroux
NEED TO KNOW
- The National Book Critics Circle shares its winners for the 2025 publishing year
- Winners were chosen based on their ability to cover both timely and timeless topics
- NBCC President Adam Dalva highlighted the organization’s mission, “To never be afraid to voice their opinions, even in these turbulent times”
The National Book Critics Circle has announced the recipients of its book awards for the 2025 publishing year.
Kevin Young, Arundhati Roy and Karen Hao are among award winners, PEOPLE can confirm. PBS and NPR were also honored with the Toni Morrison Achievement Award at a ceremony held in New York City on March 26.
Achievement awards for Frances FitzGerald, NPR, and PBS, among other honors, were also announced.
“The very concept of the free press is under attack,” NBCC President Adam Dalva said. “And yet here we are, defiantly carrying on the NBCC’s mission: to seek the right for our members, and for critics around the world, to think freely. To never be afraid to voice their opinions, even in these turbulent times.”
Winners were chosen based on their ability to cover both timely and timeless topics, according to a press release.
Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, which was translated from Korean by e.yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, won the fiction award. The book also won the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Committee chair Heather Scott Partington praised Kang’s work as “blinding melancholy, bleak weather and murmuring syntax. It is a subtly rendered sketch of trauma in the wake of the Jeju Massacre and a rumination on creation and truth amidst loss. This artful novel lingers like an atmospheric and arresting dream.”
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen Hao won the nonfiction award, while Arundhati Roy won the autobiography award for her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me.
Chair Iris Jamahl Dunkle spoke highly of biography award winner Alex Green's A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America's Disabled, as a “well researched biography [which] brings back a story that had been hidden in the archives for a century.”
Dunkle added that the book highlighted a doctor “who transformed our understanding of disabilities in ways that continue to influence our views today. But as Green reveals, Fernald was a complex character whose legacy is both inspiring and troubling.”
Other winners include Quinn Slobodian for the criticism award for Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right and Kevin Young’s Night Watch for poetry.
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Natasha Lehrer picked up the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize; Nicholas Boggs won the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book for Baldwin: A Love Story; the NBCC Service Award went to Elizabeth Taylor, longtime literary editor of the Chicago Tribune; and Rhoda Feng won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
Frances FitzGerald was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, while the Toni Morrison Achievement Award was jointly awarded to NPR and PBS.
“When done well, criticism allows for the kind of slow thinking that creates new networks of thought,” Dalva said. “This kind of deliberation feeds into culture, politics and life. The more we write, the more change we can enact, creatively and practically.”
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