National Book Critics Circle Award

Award for a best first book in any genre.

Ivan Sandrof was one founder of the National Book Critics Circle[1] and its first President.[8]

The Sandrof Award has also been presented as the "Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publishing" and the "Ivan Sandrof Award, Contribution to American Arts & Letters".

The Balakian Citation is annual. It honors Nona Balakian, who was one of three NBCC founders.[1][11] For 43 years, Balakian was an editor on the staff of the New York Times Book Review.[12] Five finalists are announced each year, one of whom is selected as the winner of the citation. The award has been called "the most prestigious award for book criticism in the country".[13]

The 2007 award winners () were announced on March 6, 2008.[14][15]

• Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
• Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
• Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (Dial Press)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger's Daughter (Ecco)
• Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon and Schuster)

• Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism (Hill & Wang)
• Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press)
• Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (Doubleday)
• Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne BKs/St. Martin’s)

• Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
• Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco)
• Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
• Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia (Random House)

• Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)
• Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (Knopf)
• Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison (Knopf)
• John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932 (Knopf)
• Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (Penguin Press)

• Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)
• Matthea Harvey, Modern Life (Graywolf)
• Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking (Flood)
• Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood)
• Tadeusz Rózewicz, New Poems (Archipelago)

• Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon)
• Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quniceanera (Viking)
• Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream (Metropolitan/Holt)
• Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

• Brooke Allen
• Sam Anderson, book critic for New York magazine
• Ron Charles
• Walter Kirn
• Adam Kirsch

• Emilie Buchwald, writer, editor, and founding publisher of Milkweed Editions, in Minneapolis.

The 2008 winners () were announced March 12, 2009.[16]

• Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
• Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
• Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (Random House)
• M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (West Virginia University Press)

• Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering (Knopf)
• Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (Knopf)
• George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University Press)
• Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (Atlantic)
• Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (Doubleday)

• Rick Bass, Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin)
• Helene Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach (Simon and Schuster)
• Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter (W.W. Norton)
• Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven (Harmony Books)
• Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin)

• Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century (Penguin Press)
• Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Knopf)
• Paul J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (Amistad)
• Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)
• Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf)

• Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)[lower-alpha 1]
• Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
• August Kleinzahler, Sleeping it Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)[lower-alpha 1]
• Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
• Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)

• Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books)
• Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life (Boston Review/MIT)
• Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One Of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (Doubleday)
• Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press)
• Reginald Shepard, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (University of Michigan Press)

• Michael Antman
• Ron Charles
• Kathryn Harrison
• Laila Lalami
• Todd Shy

• PEN American Center[10]

The 2009 winners () were announced March 11, 2010.

• Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
• Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
• Michelle Huneven, Blame (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG)
• Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)

• Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press)
• Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)
• Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon)
• Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains (Random House)
• William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking)

• Eula Biss, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press)
• Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf Press)
• Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)
• David Hajdu, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo Press)
• Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber)

• Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Knopf)
• Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown)
• Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press)
• Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)

• Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)
• Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Mary Karr, Lit (Harper)
• Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
• Edmund White, City Boy ( Bloomsbury)

• Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)
• Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• D. A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)
• Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
• Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)

• Joan Acocella
• Michael Antman
• William Deresiewicz
• Donna Seaman
• Wendy Smith

• Joyce Carol Oates

The 2010 winners () were announced March 10, 2011.[17]

• Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf)
• Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Farrar, Straus And Giroux)
• David Grossman, To The End of the Land (Knopf)
• Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key (Farrar, Straus And Giroux)
• Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (Faber & Faber)

• Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Spiegel & Grau)
• S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American (Scribner)
• Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (Random )
• Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner )
• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Random)

• Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (Harper )
• Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press)
• Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance (University of Chicago Press)
• Ander Monson, Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf)

• Sarah Bakewell, How To Live, Or A Life Of Montaigne (Other Press)
• Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives Of Somerset Maugham: A Biography (Random House)
• Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective And His Rendezvous With American History (Norton)
• Thomas Powers, The Killing Of Crazy Horse (Knopf)
• Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Lives And Legends (Doubleday)

• Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 (Scribner)
• David Dow, The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve)
• Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (Twelve)
• Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Hiroshima in the Morning (feminist Press)
• Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco)
• Darin Strauss, Half a Life (McSweeney’s)

• Anne Carson, Nox (New Directions)
• Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)
• Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Penguin Poets)
• Kay Ryan, The Best of It (Grove)
• C.D. Wright, One With Others (Copper Canyon)

• Sarah L. Courteau
• William Deresiewicz
• Ruth Franklin
• Kathryn Harrison
• Parul Sehgal

• Dalkey Archive Press

The awards () were presented March 8, 2012, at the New School in New York City.[18]

• Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia
• Teju Cole, Open City
• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child
• Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

• John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays
• Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
• James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
• Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
• Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

• David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
• Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
• Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
• Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture: Essays
• Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music

• Bruce Smith, Devotions
• Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch
• Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia
• Forrest Gander, Core Samples From the World
• Laura Kasischke, Space, In Chains

• Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing
• Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace
• Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
• Luis J. Rodriguez, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing
• Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

• Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution
• John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life
• Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961
• Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
• Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

• Robert Silvers, editor of New York Review of Books

• Kathryn Schulz

The finalists were announced January 14, 2013.[19] The winners () were announced on February 28, 2013.[20]

• Laurent Binet, HHhH tr. by Sam Taylor
• Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
• Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son
• Lydia Millet, Magnificence
• Zadie Smith, NW

• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
• Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
• Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
• David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
• Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

• Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach
• Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
• Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey
• Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
• Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness

• David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
• Lucia Perillo, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
• Allan Peterson, Fragile Acts
• D. A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys
• A. E. Stallings, Olives

• Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us
• Maureen N. McLane, My Poets
• Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
• Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o, In the House of the Interpreter

• Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
• Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives
• Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
• Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography
• Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

• William Deresiewicz

The finalists were announced on January 14, 2014.[21] The winners () were announced on March 13, 2014.[22]

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Knopf)
• Alice McDermott, Someone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Javier Marías, The Infatuations, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Knopf)
• Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (Viking)
• Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little, Brown)

• Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice (Norton)
• Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown)
• David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Knopf)

• Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Knopf)
• Denise Duhamel, Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon)
• Carmen Gimenez Smith, Milk and Filth (University of Arizona Press)

• Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave (Knopf)
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (Viking)
• Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury)
• Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (Simon & Schuster)

• Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Doubleday)
• Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale University Press)
• John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Knopf)
• Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Mark Thompson, Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kis (Cornell University Press)

• Hilton Als, White Girls (McSweeney’s)
• Mary Beard, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations (Liveright)
• Jonathan Franzen, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (Verso)

• Rolando Hinojosa-Smith

• Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth)

• Katherine A. Powers
• Ruth Franklin
• James Marcus
• Roxana Robinson
• Alexandra Schwartz

The finalists were announced on January 19, 2015.[23] The winners () were announced March 12, 2015.[24]

• Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
• Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
• Lily King, Euphoria
• Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
• Marilynne Robinson, Lila

• David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
• Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
• Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
• Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer
• Hector Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free

• Saeed Jones, Prelude to Bruise
• Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
• Christian Wiman, Once in the West
• Jake Adam York, Abide

• Blake Bailey, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait
• Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
• Lacy M. Johnson, The Other Side
• Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure
• Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not

• Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown: An African American Life
• S. C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson
• John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
• Ian S. MacNiven, "Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions
• Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

• Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Innoculation
• Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
• Lynne Tillman, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
• Ellen Willis, The Essential Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz

• Toni Morrison

• Phil Klay, Redeployment

• Alexandra Schwartz
• Charles Finch
• B. K. Fischer
• Benjamin Moser
• Lisa Russ Spaar

The finalists were announced on January 18, 2016.[25] The winners () were announced March 17, 2016 at the New School in New York.[26]

• Paul Beatty, The Sellout
• Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
• Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth
• Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno
• Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

• Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
• Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
• Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
• Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
• Brian Seibert, What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing

• Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World
• Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City
• George Hodgman, Bettyville
• Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir
• Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

• Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth
• Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
• T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
• Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
• Karin Wieland and Shelly Frisch, Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
• Leo Damrosch, Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake
• Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
• Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop
• James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life

• Ross Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude
• Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn
• Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
• Sinéad Morrissey, Parallax: And Selected Poems
• Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

• Wendell Berry

• Kirstin Valdez Quade, Night at the Fiestas

• Carlos Lozada

The finalists were announced on January 17, 2017.[27] The winners () were announced March 17, 2017 at the New School in New York.[28]

• Michael Chabon, Moonglow: A Novel
• Louise Erdrich, LaRose
• Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
• Ann Patchett, Commonwealth
• Zadie Smith, Swing Time

• Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
• Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
• Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
• John Edgar Wideman, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File

• Marion Coutts, The Iceberg
• Jenny Diski, In Gratitude
• Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
• Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
• Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

• Nigel Cliff, Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story
• Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
• Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary
• Michael Tisserand, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White
• Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

• Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
• Mark Greif, Against Everything: Essays
• Alice Kaplan, Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic
• Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
• Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

• Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons
• Tyehimba Jess, Olio
• Bernadette Mayer, Works and Days
• Robert Pinsky, At the Foundling Hospital
• Monica Youn, Blackacre

• Margaret Atwood

• Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

• Michelle Dean

The finalists were announced on January 21, 2018.[29][30] The winners () were announced on March 15, 2018 at the New School in New York.[31]

• Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
• Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour
• Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
• Joan Silber, Improvement
• Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

• Jack Davis, Gulf: The Making of An American Sea
• Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
• Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
• Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
• Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

• Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
• Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
• Henry Marsh, Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon
• Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia
• Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China

• Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
• Howard Markel, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek
• William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times
• Ken Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

• Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages
• Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
• Camille Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
• Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
• Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News

• Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular
• James Longenbach, Earthling
• Layli Long Soldier, Whereas
• Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow
• Ana Ristovic, Directions for Use

• John McPhee

• Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

• Charles Finch

The finalists were announced on January 22, 2019.[32] The winners () were announced at the New School in New York on March 14, 2019.[33]

• Anna Burns, Milkman
• Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man. Translated by Linda Coverdale
• Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
• Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room
• Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

• Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border
• Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
• Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
• Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State

• Richard Beard, The Day That Went Missing: A Family's Story
• Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
• Rigoberto Gonzalez, What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood
• Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home
• Nell Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
• Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir

• Christopher Bonanos, Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
• Craig Brown, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret
• Yunte Huang, Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
• Mark Lamster, The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century
• Jane Leavy, The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created

• Robert Christgau, Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017
• Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
• Terrance Hayes, To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight
• Lacy M. Johnson, The Reckonings: Essays
• Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

• Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
• Ada Limón, The Carrying
• Erika Meitner, Holy Moly Carry Me
• Diane Seuss, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
• Adam Zagajewski, Asymmetry. Translated by Clare Cavanagh

• Tommy Orange, There There

• Arte Público Press[34]

• Maureen Corrigan

Finalists were announced on January 11, 2020.[35] The winners () were announced March 12, 2020.[36]

• Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside
• Myla Goldberg, Feast Your Eyes
• Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
• Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
• Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

• Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future
• Peter Hessler, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution
• Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
• Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives
• Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

• Laura Cumming, Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child
• Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
• Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir
• Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
• Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir

• Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
• Josh Levin, The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
• Lucasta Miller, L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”
• George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
• Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

• Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain
• Lydia Davis, Essays One
• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Peter Schjeldahl, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
• Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic

• Jericho Brown, The Tradition
• Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
• Morgan Parker, Magical Negro
• Mary Ruefle, Dunce
• Brian Teare, Doomstead Days

Finalists were announced on January 24, 2021.[37]

• Martin Amis, Inside Story (Knopf)
• Randall Kenan, If I Had Two Wings (W.W. Norton)
• Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Knopf)
• Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife (Little, Brown)
• Bryan Washington, Memorial (Riverhead)

• Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St, Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic)
• James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (Penguin Press)
• Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs (Scribner)
• Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (Random House)
• Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Harvard Univ. Press)

• Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World)
• Shayla Lawson, This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope (HarperPerennial)
• Riva Lehrer, Golem Girl (One World)
• Wayétu Moore, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women (Graywolf)
• Alia Volz, Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (HMH)

• Amy Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner)
• Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (Random House)
• Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf)
• Les Payne, Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright)
• Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (Knopf)

• Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard Univ. Press)
• Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces (Transit)
• Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press)
• Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Wendy A. Woloson, Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (Univ. of Chicago Press)

• Victoria Chang, Obit  (Copper Canyon)
• Francine J. Harris, Here Is The Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Imperial Liquor (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press)
• Chris Nealon, The Shore (Wave)
• Danez Smith, Homie (Graywolf)

• Kerri Arsenault, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains (St. Martin’s)
• Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans (One World)
• Raven Leilani, Luster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Megha Majumdar, A Burning (Knopf)
• Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (Grove)
• Brandon Taylor, Real Life (Riverhead)
• C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead)

• Jo Livingstone
• Rumaan Alam
• Jake Cline
• Sophie Haigney
• Dean Rader

The Feminist Press at the City University of New York