A novel by Nobel laureate Han Kang, Karen Hao’s examination of artificial intelligence and OpenAI, and a memoir by Arundhati Roy were among the winners of the National Book Critics Circle awards.
Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, addresses the 1948–1949 uprising on Jeju, an island south of the Korean mainland, in which thousands were killed. Heather Scott Partington, chair of the awards’ fiction committee, called the novel “a work of blinding melancholy, bleak weather, and murmuring syntax” that “lingers like an atmospheric and arresting dream.”
The lifetime achievement award went to author and journalist Frances FitzGerald, whose 1972 Fire in the Lake offered an early, prescient perspective on the Vietnam War. NPR and PBS received the achievement award honoring institutions that have made significant contributions to book culture; Jacob M. Appel, who chaired the selection process, praised them for their service to both book culture and American democracy.
Other category winners included:
– Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (non-fiction)
– Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me (autobiography)
– Alex Green, A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled (biography)
– Kevin Young, Night Watch (poetry)
– Neige Sinno, Sad Tiger, translated by Natasha Lehrer (translation prize, honoring author and translator)
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in New York in 1974, comprises more than 850 critics and editors. Its annual awards recognize the best books published in the United States in the past year.
