Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2015: Complete list of winners

The National Book Critics Circle Award, one of the most prestigious honors in American letters, celebrated a remarkably diverse slate of winners in 2015, each representing the year’s most vital literary achievements across six categories. The selections showcase a year when critics championed work that challenged conventions—from Paul Beatty’s audacious satirical novel The Sellout, which became a landmark in contemporary fiction, to Maggie Nelson’s genre-defying The Argonauts, a meditation on art, theory, and queer identity that demonstrated criticism itself could be transformed into literature. These awards, voted on by a panel of literary professionals and journalists, carry particular weight because they’re determined by peers rather than a single judge, offering a collective judgment of excellence.

This year’s National Book Critics Circle Award winners reflected a cultural moment when memoir and biography were gaining new urgency and complexity. Margo Jefferson’s Negroland brought lyrical introspection to the experience of Black bourgeois identity, while Charlotte Gordon’s dual biography Romantic Outlaws traced the intertwined destinies of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley across generations and revolutions. Sam Quinones’ Dreamland demonstrated the power of narrative nonfiction to illuminate contemporary crisis, and Ross Gay’s Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude proved that poetry could find grace in the everyday. Together, these six winners signal what the National Book Critics Circle Award recognizes as essential reading—work that matters not just for its craft but for what it reveals about who we are.

Below, you’ll find detailed information about each 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award winner across all categories:

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry