Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2023: Complete list of winners

The National Book Critics Circle has revealed its 2023 award winners, and this year’s selections showcase the diversity and depth that have become hallmarks of this prestigious recognition. The NBCC Awards, which have championed literary excellence since 1974, honored six outstanding books across their major categories, from Safiya Sinclair’s deeply personal How to Say Babylon: A Memoir in the autobiography category to Tina Post’s groundbreaking Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression in criticism. The winners reflect a strong commitment to storytelling that grapples with identity, history, and the human condition—whether through intimate memoir, rigorous cultural analysis, or lyric poetry translated from the Korean of Kim Hyesoon.

What’s particularly striking about this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award selections is their collective focus on documentation and witness. Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America joins Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage in centering narratives that demand our attention to systems and relationships, while Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home and the remaining winners each bring their own urgent conversations to the fore. These books represent the critics’ circle at its most vital—recognizing not just technical brilliance, but relevance and resonance.

The full roster of National Book Critics Circle Award 2023 winners across all categories is detailed below:

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

  • Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression by Tina Post

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry