The longlists for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Awards will be rolled out throughout this week. The six award categories are fiction, criticism, autobiography, biography, nonfiction, poetry, and the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. Finalists will be announced on January 20, 2026, and the winners will be named at an awards ceremony in New York City on March 26, 2026.
The NBCC started rolling out its award longlists last year.
Autobiography
Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)
The Broken King by Michael Thomas (Grove)
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan (Avid Reader Press)
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)
Paper Girl by Beth Macy (Penguin)
Shattered by Hanif Kureishi (Ecco)
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)
Twice Born: Finding My Father In the Margins of Biography by Hester Kaplan (Catapult)
Biography
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House)
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star by Mayukh Sen (W.W Norton)
A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green (Bellevue Literary Press)
Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution by Amanda Vaill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore by Ashley D. Farmer (Pantheon)
Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson by Claire Hoffman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan (Harper)
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux (W. W. Norton)
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare (Pegasus Books)
Criticism
Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019-2025 by A.S. Hamrah (n+1)
Authority: Essays by Andrea Long Chu (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time by Rasheedah Phillips (AK Press)
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman (Semiotext(e))
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)
Greyhound by Joanna Pocock (Soft Skull Press)
Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian (Princeton University Press)
Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat by Hito Steyerl (Verso Books)
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
To Save and to Destroy: Writing As an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Harvard University Press)
Fiction
The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)
Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)
The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (W.W. Norton)
Heart the Lover by Lily King (Grove)
Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury)
On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions)
Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin (New Directions)
The South by Tash Aw (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, trans. from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth)
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner)
Nonfiction
America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin (Penguin Press)
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins by Barbara Demick (Random House)
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao (Penguin Press)
The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story by Brandy Schillace (W.W. Norton)
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (Doubleday)
Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper)
No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris (Random House)
A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer (Catapult)
Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness by Michael Koresky (Bloomsbury)
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America by Michael Luo (Doubleday)
Poetry
After You Were, I Am by Camille Ralphs (McSweeney’s)
Chronicle of Drifting by Yuki Tanaka (Copper Canyon)
Death of the First Idea by Rickey Laurentiis (Knopf)
Into the Hush by Arthur Sze (Copper Canyon)
Night Watch by Kevin Young (Knopf)
The Other Love by Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Salvage by Hedgie Choi (University of Wisconsin)
small lives by Gary Jackson (University of New Mexico)
Stay Dead by Natalie Shapero (Copper Canyon)
Unravel by Tolu Oloruntoba (McClelland & Stewart)
Barrios Book in Translation Prize
Bodies Found in Various Places by Elvira Hernández, trans. from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher (Cardboard House) (Poetry)
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue by Yoko Tawada, trans. from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions) (Nonfiction)
Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece by Nasser Rabah, trans. from the Arabic by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal and Khaled Al-Hilli (City Lights) (Poetry)
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, trans. from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories) (Fiction)
Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, trans. from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen (Biblioasis) (Fiction)
Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, trans. from the French by Natasha Lehrer (Seven Stories) (Nonfiction)
The Frog in the Throat by Markus Werner, trans. from the German by Michael Hofmann (NYRB) (Fiction)
The Ruins by Ye Hui, trans. from the Chinese by Dong Li (Deep Vellum) (Poetry)
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, trans. from the Danish by Martin Aitken (New Directions) (Fiction)
Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal, trans. from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer (New Vessel Press) (Nonfiction)
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, trans. from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth) (Fiction)
Wickerwork by Christian Lehnert, trans. from the German by Richard Sieburth (Archipelago) (Poetry)
