US National Book Critics Circle Awards 2024 winners announced

Hisham Matar and Hanif Abdurraqib are among the US National Book Critics Circle Awards 2024 winners announced in New York, USA on Thursday, March 20, 2025.

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) celebrates the best books published in English in Fiction, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Poetry, and Criticism in the United States since 1974. Finalists are nominated, evaluated, and selected by a 24-member jury of critics and editors from some of the country’s leading print and online publications, as well as critics whose works appear in these publications. Previous winners include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013), Nicole R. Fleetwood, francine j. harris, Raven Leilani (2020), Safiya Sinclair and Jonny Steinberg (2023).

The 2024 edition kicked off with the award’s longlists being announced from December 16 – 19, 2024. The finalists in the categories, the John Leonard Prize, and the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize finalists were revealed to the public on Thursday, January 23.

The winners were announced at a ceremony in New York with writers of African descent among them being;

Fiction

• My Friends, Hisham Matar (Random House)

Committee chair David Varno declared Matar’s novel offers “a gripping and beautiful story of exile, literary obsession, and political intrigue,” one that “chronicles a Libyan man’s three decades in London and the friendships he makes there while involuntarily estranged from his family and homeland.”

Criticism

• There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

Committee chair J. Howard Rosier praised the book as “an innovative and lively assertion of the personal as political—rendered by examining the allure of sports culture over the state of Ohio.”

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing

• Lauren Michele Jackson.

An American culture critic and assistant professor at Northwestern University, Jackson’s entry “took a fresh and penetrating look at” Percival Everett’s James, and “brought both serious analysis and wry humor” to Sarah Thornton’s Tits Up. As Balakian committee chair Colette Bancroft stated, Jackson’s work “displayed her insight, depth and range.”

Watch the ceremony in full below;