The board of the National Book Critics Circle — on which I sit — met Saturday in New York to select the finalists for our 2015 awards. On Monday, we announced that five finalists have been chosen in six categories: Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction and Poetry.
Among the finalists are Ta-Nehisi Coates, winner of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and National Book Award winner, for “Between the World and Me” (Criticism); Booker Prize winner Helen Macdonald for “H is for Hawk” (Autobiography); Paul Beatty for “The Sellout” (Fiction), a satire of race set in Los Angeles; historian Mary Beard’s “SPQR: A History of Rome” (Nonfiction); Frank Stanford’s “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford” (Poetry); and Karin Wieland for “Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives” (Biography).
Additionally, the recipients of three awards are being announced. Poet and activist Wendell Berry will receive the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement; Kirstin Valdez Quade will be awarded the John Leonard First Book Prize for “Night at the Fiestas”; and the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada will receive the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
All the awards will be presented at a ceremony at 6 p.m. March 17 at the New School in New York. The event and a reception that follows are open to the public. Tickets are $75.
The complete list of National Book Critics Circle finalists is below.
Autobiography
— Elizabeth Alexander, “The Light of the World” (Grand Central Publishing)
— Vivian Gornick, “The Odd Woman and the City” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
— George Hodgman, “Bettyville” (Viking)
— Margo Jefferson, “Negroland” (Pantheon)
— Helen Macdonald, “H Is for Hawk” (Grove Press)
Biography
— Terry Alford, “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth” (Oxford University Press)
— Charlotte Gordon, “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley” (Random House)
— T.J. Stiles, “Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America” (Alfred A. Knopf)
— Rosemary Sullivan, “Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva” (Harper)
— Karin Wieland and Shelly Frisch, “Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives” (Liveright)
Criticism
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me” (Spiegel & Grau)
— Leo Damrosch, “Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake” (Yale University Press)
— Maggie Nelson, “The Argonauts” (Graywolf)
— Colm Toibin, “On Elizabeth Bishop” (Princeton University Press)
— James Wood, “The Nearest Thing to Life” (Brandeis University Press)
Fiction
— Paul Beatty, “The Sellout” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
— Lauren Groff, “Fates and Furies” (Riverhead)
— Valeria Luiselli, “The Story of My Teeth” (Coffee House Press)
— Anthony Marra, “The Tsar of Love and Techno” (Hogarth)
— Ottessa Moshfegh, “Eileen” (Penguin Press)
General Nonficiton
— Mary Beard, “SPQR: A History of Rome” (Liveright)
— Ari Berman, “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
— Jill Leovy, “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America” (Spiegel & Grau)
— Sam Quinones, “Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic” (Bloomsbury)
— Brian Seibert, “What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Poetry
— Ross Gay, “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” (University of Pittsburgh Press)
— Terrance Hayes, “How to Be Drawn” (Penguin)
— Ada Limon, “Bright Dead Things” (Milkweed Editions)
— Sinead Morrissey, “Parallax and Selected Poems” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
— Frank Stanford, “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford” (Copper Canyon Press)
John Leonard Prize
— Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Night at the Fiestas” (W.W. Norton & Company)
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
— Wendell Berry
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
— Carlos Lozada
Finalists for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
— Ruth Franklin
— James Parker
— Leo Robson
— Roxana Robinson
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