National Book Critics Circle Award: biography, etc.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards are annual American prizes that promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." The first awards were presented in 1976. There are now six awards for books published in the U.S. during the preceding year, in six categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography, memoir/autobiography, and criticism. For publication years 1983 through 2004, biography, autobiography, and memoir were combined in one category known as biography/autobiography. Beginning in 1985, that category was split into two awards: biography, and memoir/autobiography.

BIOGRAPHY (2005 to the present)

2023: Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, by Jonny Steinberg

2022: G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, by Beverly Gage

2021: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, by Rebecca Donner

2020: Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, by Amy Stanley

2019: The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, by Josh Levin

2018: Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous, by Christopher Bonanos

2017: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser

2016: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin

2015: Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley, by Charlotte Gordon

2014: Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, by John Lahr

2013: Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, by Leo Damrosch

2012: The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert A. Caro

2011: George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis

2010: How To Live, Or A Life of Montaigne, by Sarah Bakewell

2009: Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey

2008: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul, by Patrick French

2007: Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, by Tim Jeal

2006: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips

2005: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Martin J. Sherwin

MEMOIR/AUTOBIOGRAPHY (2005 to the present)

2023: How to Say Babylon: A Memoir, by Safiya Sinclair

2022: Stay True, by Hua Hsu

2021: Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, by Jeremy Atherton Lin

2020: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong

2019: Know My Name: A Memoir, by Chanel Miller

2018: A German Reckons With History and Home, by Nora Krug

2017: Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China, by Xiaolu Guo

2016: Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren

2015: Negroland, by Margo Jefferson

2014: Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, by Roz Chast

2013: Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, by Amy Wilentz

2012: Swimming Studies, by Leanne Sharpton

2011: The Memory Palace, by Mira Bartók

2010: Half a Life, by Darin Strauss

2009: Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill

2008: My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, by Ariel Sabar

2007: Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat

2006: The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn

2005: Them: A Memoir of Parents, by Francine du Plessix Gray 

BIOGRAPHY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR (1983-2004)

2004: de Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan

2003: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, by William Tubman

2002: Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Vol. II, by Janet Browne

2001: Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson, by Adam Sisman

2000: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix

1999: The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, by Henry Wiencek

1998: A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar

1997: Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II, by James Tobin

1996: Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt

1995: Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, by Robert Polito

1994: Shot in the Heart, by Mikal Gilmore

1993: Genet, by Edmund White

1992: Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, by Carol Brighten

1991: Patrimony: A True Story, by Philip Roth

1990: Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. II, by Robert Caro

1989: A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, by Geoffrey C. Ward

1988: Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ullmann

1987: Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World, by Donald R. Howard

1986: Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, by Theodore Rosengarten

1985: Henry James: A Life, by Leon Edel

1984: Dostoevsky: the Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, by Joseph Frank

1983: Minor Characters, by Joyce Johnson