NBCC Announces Winners of Annual Book Awards

In a March 11 ceremony, held at the Tishman Auditorium at New York University Law School in New York, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) announced the winners of its annual book awards. The fiction prize was awarded posthumously to W.G. Sebald for Austerlitz (Random House). Sebald died in an automobile accident in December 2001. His agent, Andrew Wylie, accepted the award.

Other winners included: Nicholson Baker, Double Ford: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House), for General Nonfiction; Adam Sisman, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (FSG), in the Biography/Autobiography category; Albert Goldbarth, Saving Lives (Ohio State University Press), for Poetry; and Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (Talk Miramax), in the Criticism category.

Additionally, Jason Epstein, one of the founders of the New York Review of Books, was given the NBCC’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and book critic Michael Gorra was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.