The National Book Critics Circle revealed the winners of its annual awards at a virtual ceremony Thursday evening, with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Clint Smith among those receiving the literary prizes.
Jeffers won the fiction award for The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, her debut novel about the coming of age of an aspiring scholar in search of her family’s history. Jeffers’ book was previously a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award.
Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America won the nonfiction award; it was also a finalist for PEN America’s John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.
Rebecca Donner took home the biography award for All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler; last month, the book won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
The autobiography winner was Jeremy Atherton Lin for Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, while the criticism prize went to Melissa Febos for Girlhood. Diane Seuss took home the poetry award for frank: sonnets.
The John Leonard Prize, given to the best first book in any genre, went to Anthony Veasna So for his short story collection Afterparties. So died in 2020 at the age of 28, not long before the release of the book.
The National Book Critics Circle also honored the winners of three previously announced awards: Merve Emre, who won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing; author Percival Everett, winner of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award; and the Cave Canem Foundation, which received the first-ever Toni Morrison Achievement Award, created to “honor institutions that have made lasting and meaningful contributions to book culture.”
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
