National Book Critics Circle Award 1993: Complete list of winners

The 1993 National Book Critics Circle Awards celebrate a remarkable moment in American letters, honoring works that pushed their genres forward while grappling with profound themes of identity, art, and cultural memory. Edmund White’s monumental Genet earned the rare distinction of winning in both the autobiography and biography categories—a testament to the book’s innovative approach to life-writing and its significance as a major literary achievement. Alongside White’s dual victory, the awards recognized the full spectrum of contemporary writing: Ernest J. Gaines’s moving A Lesson Before Dying captured the fiction prize, while Alan Lomax’s The Land Where the Blues Began honored a lifetime of scholarship on American music and culture, earning the nonfiction award.

What makes this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award selections particularly striking is how they collectively document American identity through various lenses—personal, historical, artistic, and musical. Mark Doty’s My Alexandria brought urgent, lyrical poetry to the award, while John Dizikes’s Opera in America: A Cultural History expanded the critical conversation to include the overlooked history of opera in the United States. These winners reflect a year when the National Book Critics Circle Award winners demonstrated the vitality of serious literary work across multiple forms, from memoir to music history to fiction that confronts mortality and injustice.

Below, discover the complete list of 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award winners across all categories:

Autobiography

• Genet by Edmund White

Biography

• Genet by Edmund White

Criticism

• Opera in America: A Cultural History by John Dizikes

Fiction

• A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

Nonfiction

• The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax

Poetry

• My Alexandria by Mark Doty