National Book Critics Circle Award: nonfiction

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, for books published in 1975. 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. 

2023: We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, by Roxanna Asgarian

2022: The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, by Isaac Butler

2021: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith

2020: Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire, by Tom Zoellner

2019: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe

2018: Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan, by Steve Coll

2017: The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, by Frances FitzGerald

2016: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond

2015: Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic, by Sam Quinones

2014: The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, by David Brion Davis

2013: Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink

2012: Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, by Andrew Solomon

2011: Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, by Maya Jasanoff

2010: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson

2009: The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes

2008: The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins

2007: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington

2006: Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, by Simon Schama

2005: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich

2004: The Reformation: A History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

2003: Sons of Mississippi, by Paul Hendrickson

2002: A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power

2001: Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, by Nicholson Baker

2000: Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, by Ted Conover

1999: Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior, by Jonathan Weiner

1998: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch

1997: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman

1996: Bad Land: An American Romance, by Jonathan Raban

1995: A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr

1994: The Rape of Europe: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, by Lynn H. Nicholas

1993: The Land Where the Blues Began, by Alan Lomax

1992: Young Men and Fire, by Norman Maclean

1991: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, by Susan Faludi

1990: The Content of Our Character; A New Vision of Race in America, by Shelby Steele

1989: The Broken Cord, by Michael Dorris

1988: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, by Taylor Branch

1987: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes

1986: War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, by John W. Dower

1985: Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, by  J. Anthony Lucas

1984: Weapons and Hope, by Freeman Dyson

1983: The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, by Seymour M. Hersh

1982: The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, by  Robert Caro

1981: The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould

1980: Walter Lippmann and the American Century, by Ronald Steel

1979: Munich: The Price of Peace, by Telford Taylor 

1978: Facts of Life, by Maureen Howard

1977:  Samuel Johnson, by Walter Jackson Bate

1976: The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston

1975: Edith Wharton: A Biography, by R.W.B. Lewis