The finalists for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced across the categories of fiction, criticism, autobiography, biography, nonfiction, poetry, as well as for the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the John Leonard First Book Prize. Winners will be named at an awards ceremony in New York City on March 26.
The NBCC has also announced the winners of three of its special awards: Elizabeth Taylor, Rhoda Feng, and Frances FitzGerald have won the NBCC Service Award, Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, respectively.
Autobiography
- 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)
- A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)
Biography
- 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)
- Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan (Harper)
Criticism
- 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)
- 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)
- On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions)
- 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)
- King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (Doubleday)
- No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris (Random House)
Poetry
- Chronicle of Drifting by Yuki Tanaka (Copper Canyon)
- Death of the First Idea by Rickey Laurentiis (Knopf)
- Night Watch by Kevin Young (Knopf)
- The Other Love by Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Unravel by Tolu Oloruntoba (McClelland & Stewart)
Barrios Book in Translation Prize
- Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue by Yoko Tawada, trans. from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions) (Nonfiction)
- 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 Wax Child by Olga Ravn, trans. from the Danish by Martin Aitken (New Directions) (Fiction)
John Leonard Prize for Best First Book
- Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Crown by Evanthia Bromiley (Grove)
- Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, trans. from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Hogarth)
- Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly (Atria/One Signal)
- Salvage by Hedgie Choi (University of Wisconsin Press)
- The Slip by Lucas Schaefer (Simon & Schuster)
