Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2024: Complete list of winners

The National Book Critics Circle Award winners for 2024 represent a striking range of voices and perspectives, from a former Russian political prisoner’s unflinching memoir to a meditation on basketball as metaphor for Black aspiration. This year’s selections underscore the Circle’s commitment to honoring literary excellence across multiple genres—and a particular appetite for books that grapple with urgent contemporary issues through distinctive, often innovative prose. Whether through translation, biography, or experimental poetry, these six winning works share a certain fearlessness in their approach to storytelling and form.

Among the standouts, Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space claims the Nonfiction prize with a meticulously researched account of the 1986 Space Shuttle disaster, while Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension wins Criticism by weaving personal reflection with cultural analysis. In autobiography, Alexei Navalny’s Patriot: A Memoir—newly translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel—offers readers an intimate window into the life of Russia’s most prominent political dissident. Hisham Matar’s My Friends claims the Fiction prize, Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar triumphs in Biography, and Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma rounds out the circle with the Poetry award, cementing Carson’s status as one of our most inventive literary voices.

The full roster of winners across all categories is detailed below.

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry