National Book Critics Circle Award Recipients (& Contenders) Announced

Our favorite poet/farmer/novelist, Wendell Berry, receives the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, while the nonfiction critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada, takes home the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Autobiography, biography, and criticism finalists have been announced via The New York Times:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, already a National Book Award winner for “Between the World and Me,” now has a chance to add a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism to his mantel. Mr. Coates’s book, a meditation on racism in America written in the form of a letter to his son, joins works by the novelist Lauren Groff, the memoirist and critic Vivian Gornick and the poet Ada Limón among those nominated for the awards.

The awards, determined by a jury of critics and book review editors, honor excellence in six categories – autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. The winners will be named on March 17. On Monday, however, the group announced the recipients of its two annual citations: Wendell Berry, an environmentalist, farmer and novelist, won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, while Carlos Lozada, the nonfiction critic for The Washington Post, captured the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

Besides Ms. Groff’s nomination for “Fates and Furies,” the fiction finalists include: Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout,” Valeria Luiselli’s “The Story of My Teeth,” Anthony Marra’s “The Tsar of Love and Techno” and Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Eileen.”

Read more at The New York Times. The list of finalist for poetry can be found at the National Book Critics Circle site, and they are:

Ross Gay, “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Terrance Hayes, “How to Be Drawn” (Penguin)

Ada Limón, “Bright Dead Things” (Milkweed Editions)

Sinéad Morrissey, “Parallax and Selected Poems” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Frank Stanford, “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford” (Copper Canyon Press)