On Monday, January 22, 2018 the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) announced their list of finalists for the 2017 NBCC Awards. The list is comprised of thirty authors among six different categories. The NBCC awards began in 1975 and are selected by a jury of contemporary critics and book-review editors.

The NBCC also announced the winners of three additional prizes. The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award was awarded to John McPhee. The John Leonard Prize, which honors an author’s first book, was awarded to Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. The 2017 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing was awarded to Charles Finch.

The NBCC Awards will be presented on March 15, 2018 at the New School in New York City. There will be readings by the finalists on the evening of March 14. Both the ceremony and the readings are open to the public and are free of charge. Tickets are also available for a fundraising reception to take place after the awards ceremony.

Autobiography

Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir; Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body; Henry Marsh, Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon; Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, translated by Anna Summers; and Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China.

Biography

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder; Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography; Howard Markel, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek; William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times; and Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times.

Nonfiction

Jack E. Davis, The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea; Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America; Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia; Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe; and Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes.

Criticism

Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages; Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story; Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History; Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions; and Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News

Fiction

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West; Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour; Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness; Joan Silber, Improvement; and Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Poetry

Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular; James Longenbach, Earthling; Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS; Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow; and Ana Ristovi?, Directions for Use, translated by Steven Teref and Maja Teref.

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing

Winner: Charles Finch
Finalists: David Biespiel, Maureen Corrigan, Ruth Franklin, James Marcus

John Leonard Prize

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award

John McPhee

Claremont Graduate University announced the finalists for its Kingsley and Kate Tufts Awards.

The Kingsley Tufts Award is a $100,000 prize given to a poet in mid-career. The 2017 finalists are: Kathy Fagan, Sycamore; Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons; Paisley Rekdal, Imaginary Vessels; Patricia Smith, Incendiary Art; and Monica Youn, Blackacre.

The Kate Tufts Discovery Award is a $10,000 prize given to a writer of a first book of poems. The 2017 finalists are: Ari Banias, Anybody; Donika Kelly, Bestiary; Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS; Tommy Pico, IRL; and Mai Der Vang, Afterland.