Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2010: Complete list of winners

The National Book Critics Circle Award has long been one of the literary world’s most respected honors, and the 2010 winners demonstrate why readers and industry professionals alike turn to the NBCC’s selections as a guide to exceptional writing. That year’s slate of honorees showcased remarkable breadth—from Jennifer Egan’s genre-bending A Visit from the Goon Squad, which claimed Fiction, to Isabel Wilkerson’s sweeping The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which won in the Nonfiction category. These weren’t just books that critics admired; they were works that seemed to capture something essential about storytelling itself, whether through fragmented narratives, meticulously researched history, or deeply personal memoir.

Beyond the major categories, the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award winners revealed the circle’s commitment to recognizing diverse forms of literary achievement. Darin Strauss’s Half a Life earned the Autobiography prize, while Sarah Bakewell’s inventive How To Live, Or A Life Of Montaigne brought fresh vitality to the Biography category. The awards also honored critical scholarship with Clare Cavanagh’s Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West and C.D. Wright’s One With Others in Poetry, underlining that the NBCC values not just the creation of literature but thoughtful engagement with it.

Here are all the National Book Critics Circle Award winners from 2010:

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry