Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2001: Complete list of winners

The 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award winners showcased a year of remarkable literary achievement across multiple genres, with Adam Sisman’s meticulously researched Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson making an impressive double sweep by winning both the Autobiography and Biography categories. This scholarly work, which explores how James Boswell came to write his monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, demonstrated the year’s appetite for deeply intelligent, historically grounded narratives that examine the nature of biographical writing itself.

Beyond Sisman’s dual victory, the 2001 NBCC Awards reflected a year when critics were drawn to formally inventive and intellectually demanding work. W.G. Sebald’s haunting novel Austerlitz—brought to English-language readers through Anthea Bell’s translation—captured the Fiction prize with its fragmented, meditative approach to memory and history, while Martin Amis’s sprawling collection The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000 won Criticism, and Nicholson Baker’s provocative Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper took the Nonfiction prize by tackling the fraught relationship between libraries and preservation. Albert Goldbarth’s Saving Lives rounded out the winners in Poetry, completing a slate that emphasized intellectual rigor and stylistic sophistication across all categories.

Here’s a closer look at each of the National Book Critics Circle Award winners from 2001:

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

Fiction

  • Austerlitz by W.G. SebaldwithAnthea Bell(trans.)

Nonfiction

Poetry