Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2000: Complete list of winners

The National Book Critics Circle Award has long served as one of the literary world’s most respected recognitions, chosen by active book reviewers and critics rather than a single judge’s whim. The 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award winners showcase the organization’s knack for honoring work that matters—books that challenge, provoke, and illuminate in equal measure. Herbert P. Bix’s Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan made a particular splash that year, earning recognition in both the autobiography and biography categories, a testament to its exhaustive research and riveting exploration of Japan’s wartime emperor. The book represents exactly the kind of substantial, consequential nonfiction the Circle champions.

Beyond Bix’s double win, the 2000 awards reveal a year of remarkable range. Jim Crace’s Being Dead brought darkly inventive fiction to the fore, while Ted Conover’s Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing offered gripping reportage from inside America’s prisons. Cynthia Ozick’s Quarrel & Quandary collected essays that proved criticism itself could be literature, and Judy Jordan’s Carolina Ghost Woods reminded the Circle that poetry deserves a prominent seat at the table. Together, these winners paint a portrait of what serious readers and critics valued at the millennium’s turn.

Here are all the winners from that year:

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry