Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2007: Complete list of winners

The 2007 National Book Critics Circle Awards showcased an extraordinarily diverse range of voices and subjects, cementing the year as a landmark moment in contemporary letters. Junot Díaz’s electrifying debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao took the fiction prize, announcing a major talent with its inventive blend of Dominican-American identity, pop culture, and literary ambition. But the true breadth of the Circle’s selections that year reveals how the awards—among the most prestigious honors in American publishing—champion work across all genres, from the deeply personal to the rigorously historical.

The nonfiction category alone speaks to the Circle’s commitment to challenging and essential work. Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid exposed the horrifying legacy of medical exploitation of African Americans, while Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise offered an ambitious history of twentieth-century classical music that somehow managed to be both scholarly and genuinely thrilling. Meanwhile, Edwidge Danticat’s devastating memoir Brother, I’m Dying—a meditation on family, displacement, and mortality—claimed the autobiography prize, joining an autobiography category that has long been one of the Circle’s most compelling.

Beyond the headline-making fiction winner, the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award winners collectively reflected a year when literary institutions were rewarding boldness: Tim Jeal’s authoritative biography of Henry Morton Stanley redefined exploration literature, Mary Jo Bang’s spare and elegant collection Elegy represented the year’s best in poetry, and the breadth of recognition across categories demonstrated the Circle’s enduring influence on serious readers everywhere. Here are the complete winners from that landmark year:

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry