National Book Critics Circle Award Winners Announced
March 22, 2013
The winners of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle awards were announced in February. Ben Fountain’s debut novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, won for fiction; D.A. Powell’s collection, Useless Landscape, or A Guide For Boys, won for poetry; Andrew Solomon’s, Far From The Tree, won for general nonfiction; Robert Caro’s, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, won for biography; Leanne Shapton’s, Swimming Studies, won for autobiography; and Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, won for criticism.
At Library Journal, Barbara Hoffert, Awards Chair and former president of the NBCC, said “I want to highlight these awards, having just wrapped up six years as awards vice president for the NBCC… these are the only ones given anywhere that are chosen exclusively by practicing critics. They’re well-considered, well-debated awards by folks who read widely and have no axe to grind.” Hoffert asserts that this year’s finalists prove how the awards are imperative in not just invigorating readers by providing lists of “great reads” and promoting literary conversation but also serving as a “good measure of what’s happening in literature today.”
Hoffert cited Fountain for his “real accomplishment, bringing the war back home”; Powell for “effectively captur[ing] the spiritual and the profane, growing up and growing old”; Solomon for showing how “boundary drawing in life is fading, just as it is in literature”; Caro’s “ferociously detailed biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson”; Shapton’s “study of the self through a study of the body; and Warner for “reinvigorating A Thousand and One Nights.”
Source: Library Journal
