Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2006: Complete list of winners

The National Book Critics Circle Award announced its 2006 honorees this year, cementing what was already shaping up to be a remarkable season for literary prizes. The winners span an impressive range of voices and subjects, from Kiran Desai’s multigenerational family saga The Inheritance of Loss claiming the Fiction prize to Daniel Mendelsohn’s deeply personal The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million winning Autobiography. These selections reflect the Circle’s commitment to recognizing both the most accomplished storytelling and the most intellectually rigorous explorations of identity, history, and human experience.

Beyond the headline winners, this year’s circle of honorees showcases the breadth that distinguishes the NBCC Award from many of its peers. Julie Phillips’ biography of the sci-fi pioneer known as James Tiptree, Jr. offers a fascinating portrait of the double life of Alice B. Sheldon, while historian Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution brings a sweeping yet intimate perspective to a pivotal moment in world history. Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences and Troy Jollimore’s Tom Thomson in Purgatory round out the slate, each representing the kind of genre-defying and formally inventive work that the Critics Circle has long championed.

Below is the complete list of 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award winners across all categories:

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry