National Book Critics Circle Announces 2021 Award Winners

Anthony Veasna So“Afterparties,” a collection of short stories focusing on the lives of Cambodian Americans in California, National Book Critics Circle Award For the best debut book on Thursday.

Dark and funny turns, “Friends” It explores the ways in which the trauma suffered by Cambodian refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge genocide resonates across generations.

The critically acclaimed collection was released approximately eight months later. so is death 28-year-old drug overdose.

In a statement, one of the judges, Jenny Shank, praised So’s “vivacity, originality and good humor” and noted that the organization “assembled So’s loved ones and readers to celebrate So’s work and mourn her loss.”

Other winners announced in a virtual ceremony Thursday night included: Diana SeussWinner of the poetry award with his collection “frank: sonnets”; Criticism winner Melissa Febos “Maiden Age”; Jeremy Atherton Lin, winner of the Autobiography award, “Gay Bar: Why Did We Go Out?”; and Rebecca Donner, winner of the biography award “All the Troubles Frequently Encountered Today: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Woman’s Resistance Against Hitler.”

“WEB Du Bois’s Love Songs” Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ novel, which explores class, colorism, and privilege through the story of a young Black woman and her ancestors growing up in late 20th-century Georgia, won the prize for fiction. The non-fiction book award goes to Clint Smith “How to Speak” It examines how America recalled and distorted its legacy of slavery.

Along with the National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Awards are among the most prestigious literary awards in the United States. Founded in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle consists of more than 600 literary critics and book review editors in the United States.

The NBCC awards differ from other awards because the recipients are chosen by book critics rather than by committees of authors or academics. The organization’s annual awards for works published the previous year, usually in the spring, are open to books published in English in the United States.

This is the third year that the awards have been presented virtually, and it is a reminder of the long toll the pandemic has taken on live literary events.

In addition to awards for single titles, the NBCC awards awards for continued work and lifetime achievement.

Merve Emre, a contributing writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Oxford University, received the 2021 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, awarded to an NBCC member for her critical work.

The Toni Morrison Achievement Award, a new award created by the NBCC in 2021 to honor the institutions that have shaped book culture, Cave Canem Foundationan author center that helps fuel the careers of famous Black poets.

The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award goes to the novelist Percival EverettHe has published more than 30 novels and collections of short stories and poems. Jacob Appel, chairman of the awards committee, praised Everett as “profound and productive” in a quote.

“Great over and over again, novel after novel, story after story, each one after another more original and thought provoking,” Appel said. “There are two kinds of readers in America: those who read Percival Everett and those who kidnapped.”