Living Canon

National Book Critics Circle Award 2025: Complete list of winners

The 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award winners have arrived, and this year’s selections showcase the breadth and urgency of contemporary literary achievement. The NBCC recognizes excellence across six categories, and the 2025 slate feels particularly attuned to our moment—grappling with technology’s transformative power, historical injustice, and the persistent question of how we tell our most intimate stories. Arundhati Roy returns with Mother Mary Comes to Me, her venture into autobiography, while Karen Hao’s Empire of AI captures the messy mythology surrounding artificial intelligence and its architects. These are books that matter not just aesthetically but culturally.

The National Book Critics Circle Award has long served as a counterweight to more commercial award cycles, often championing work that pushes genre boundaries and challenges conventional thinking. This year proves no exception. Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, represents the growing recognition of translated literature in major awards, while Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards tackles the dangerous intersection of economic theory and white supremacy—precisely the kind of unflinching intellectual work the Critics Circle values. From Kevin Young’s Night Watch in poetry to Alex Green’s meticulous A Perfect Turmoil in biography, the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award winners collectively map the territory where literature engages most urgently with power, history, and human complexity.

Here are the complete 2025 winners across all categories:

Autobiography

Biography

Criticism

  • Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian

Fiction

  • We Do Not Part by Han Kangwith e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (trans.)

Nonfiction

Poetry