Last Thursday, the National Book Critics Circle announced the winners of its book awards for publishing year 2015 at the award ceremony held at the New School in New York City.

The winners include Paul Beatty’s satirical novel on race, The Sell Out (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Ross Gay’s poetry collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press); Charlotte Gordon’s dual biography, The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House); Margo Jefferson’s autobiography about growing up in an elite African American family, Negroland (Pantheon); Maggie Nelson’s story of queer family-life, The Argonauts (Graywolf Press); Kirstin Valdez Quade’s short story collection, Night at the Fiestas (W.W. Norton); and Sam Quinones’ nonfiction book about the opiate addiction crisis, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury).

Associate Editor and Nonfiction Book Critic at the Washington Post, Carlos Lozada, received the 2015 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Wendell Berry, a poet, essayist, and critic, was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. Berry, 81, is the author of more than fifty books, including his most recent essay collection, Our Only World (Counterpoint Press, 2015). Berry was introduced at the ceremony by actor and comedian Nick Offerman, and his remarks are available.

Founded in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Awards are given annually to “honor outstanding writing and to foster a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature,” their statement reads. The organization comprises more than seven hundred critics and editors.

Take a look at the bios of the award recipients on the National Book Critics Circle website, then listen to a podcast recording, “The Poem as a Bodily Thing,” featuring Ross Gay, Jan Beatty, Todd Davis, and Aimee Nezhukamatathil at last year’s conference.

Related reading: The New York Times lists books cited by the winners as having had the most influence on their works. Find out what the ceremony itself was like from Jonathan Sturgeon at Flavorwire.

Image credit: via NBCC.