Here are the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards finalists

The National Book Critics Circle has announced the thirty finalists for its 2020 awards.

The winner of each of the six categories — autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry — will be announced March 25 in a virtual event that's open to the public.

Also to be revealed that evening: the winner of the John Leonard Prize for first book.

Previous notable winners include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Americanah and Anna Burns for Milkman; you can browse all past winners on the NBCC's website.

Autobiography 

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

• This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope, by Shayla Lawson

• Golem Girl, by Riva Lehrer 

• The Dragons, The Giant, The Women, by Wayétu Moore 

• Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, by Alia Volz 

Biography 

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

• The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, by Zachary D. Carter 

• Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark 

• The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

• The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, by Maggie Doherty 

Criticism 

• Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, by Nicole Fleetwood 

• Stranger Faces, by Namwali Serpell 

• Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, by Cristina Rivera Garza 

• Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, by Vivian Gornick 

• Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, by Wendy A. Woloson 

Fiction 

• Inside Story, by Martin Amis 

• If I Had Two Wings, by Randall Kenan 

• Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell 

• How to Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa 

• Memorial, by Bryan Washington 

Nonfiction 

• The Broken Heart of America: St, Louis and the Violent History of the United States, by Walter Johnson 

• Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future, by James Shapiro 

• She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, by Sarah Smarsh 

• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson 

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

Poetry 

• Obit, by Victoria Chang 

• Here Is The Sweet Hand, by Francine J. Harris 

• Imperial Liquor, by Amaud Jamaul Johnson 

• The Shore, by Chris Nealon 

• Homie, by Danez Smith 

John Leonard Prize  

• Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, by Kerri Arsenault

• The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 

• Luster, by Raven Leilani 

• A Burning, by Megha Majumdar 

• Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart 

• Real Life, by Brandon Taylor 

• How Much of These Hills is Gold, by C Pam Zhang 

Related posts

• Congrats to the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award winners! 

• National Book Critics Circle, PEN America announce literary awards