National Book Critics Circle Award 1999: Complete list of winners
The 1999 National Book Critics Circle Awards celebrated a year of remarkably diverse literary achievement, from Jonathan Lethem’s inventive noir-inflected novel to Ruth Stone’s quietly luminous poetry collection. The National Book Critics Circle Award, one of America’s most respected honors for outstanding book criticism and literary excellence, recognized works that spanned genre and ambition that year. Henry Wiencek’s The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White made an unusual mark by winning in both the Autobiography and Biography categories, a testament to the book’s compelling exploration of race, family legacy, and American history through the interconnected stories of Black and white branches of the same family.
Beyond Wiencek’s dual recognition, the 1999 NBCC Awards showcased the range of voices being celebrated at the close of the decade. Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, with its protagonist afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome narrating a Brooklyn-set mystery, represented fiction’s embrace of experimental narrative techniques, while Jonathan Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory brought literary grace to the life and work of pioneering biologist Seymour Benzer. Jorge Luis Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions reminded readers of the Argentine master’s continued influence on contemporary letters, and Ruth Stone’s Ordinary Words proved that poetry could find profound resonance in the everyday details of lived experience.
Here are the complete winners across all categories:
Autobiography
The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek
Biography
- The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek
Criticism
Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Fiction
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Nonfiction
Poetry
- Ordinary Words by Ruth Stone