National Book Critics Circle Award 2020s: A decade of winners

The 2020s have been a transformative period for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a prize that has long championed intellectual rigor and literary innovation across multiple genres. As the world grappled with pandemic isolation, racial reckonings, and political upheaval, the NBCCA’s annual selections reflected a decade singularly preoccupied with memory, identity, and historical accountability. The range of winners across autobiography, biography, fiction, poetry, criticism, and nonfiction reveals how diverse and urgent contemporary literature has become—from Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), a shimmering reimagining of Shakespeare’s grief, to Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed (2021), which traced slavery’s legacy through American geography and consciousness.

What stands out across these five years is how the award has embraced a literature of witness and unflinching self-examination. Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family exemplify a surge in works that interrogate personal and collective trauma with both lyrical precision and unflinching clarity. The NBCCA has also shown remarkable openness to formally experimental and genre-bending work—Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets, Tina Post’s Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, and Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year prove that the circle’s critics remain attuned to writers pushing against conventional boundaries. Even in celebrating established voices like Lorrie Moore and Hisham Matar, the award demonstrates a commitment to literary excellence that transcends era or reputation.

Below, discover the complete list of National Book Critics Circle Award winners from 2020 through 2024: