Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2024: Complete list of winners

The National Book Critics Circle Award has revealed its 2024 honorees, and this year’s selections reflect a remarkably diverse range of voices and subjects that have captured the literary establishment’s attention. From Alexei Navalny’s powerful prison memoir “Patriot” to Anne Carson’s inventive poetry collection “Wrong Norma,” the NBCC winners demonstrate the circle’s commitment to recognizing excellence across multiple genres and perspectives. Hanif Abdurraqib’s meditation on basketball and spirituality, “There’s Always This Year,” alongside Hisham Matar’s intimate novel “My Friends,” underscore how contemporary writers are using their craft to explore identity, belonging, and the human condition in unexpectedly moving ways.

What’s particularly striking about the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award winners is how they challenge conventional boundaries between genres. Adam Higginbotham’s “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” demonstrates that narrative nonfiction can achieve the dramatic intensity of fiction, while Cynthia Carr’s biography of transgender icon Candy Darling resurrects a vital but often-overlooked chapter of American cultural history. These selections suggest the circle is actively seeking out books that don’t just tell important stories, but tell them in ways that expand what literature can do.

The National Book Critics Circle Award, widely considered one of the most respected honors in American letters, continues to set the tone for what readers and critics believe matters in contemporary publishing. Here are the complete 2024 winners across all categories:

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry