Today, the National Book Critics Circle announced their finalists for the best books published in 2025—30 books in six categories—as well as the finalists for the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, and the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and the winners of the NBCC Service Award, the Nona Balakian Citation, and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
“The NBCC is delighted to announce our 2025 shortlists. Out of the many hundreds of titles that our organization carefully considered this year, these singular and striking finalists rose to the top,” said NBCC President Adam Dalva in a statement. “Each of these books is an artistic achievement. They interrogate the lives we lead, broaden our creative and social horizons, move us, and continually surprise us. Especially in this difficult time, every one of these writers and translators deserves to be celebrated–and to be widely read.”
Here are the shortlists:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days (Viking)
Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Scribner)
Beth Macy, Paper Girl (Penguin Press)
Hanif Kureishi, Shattered (Ecco)
Miriam Toews, A Truce That Is Not Peace (Bloomsbury)
BIOGRAPHY
Mayukh Sen, Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (W.W Norton)
Alex Green, A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled (Bellevue Literary Press)
Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ashley D. Farmer, Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore (Pantheon)
Carla Kaplan, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford (Harper)
CRITICISM
Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions)
Joanna Pocock, Greyhound (Soft Skull Press)
Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Zone Books)
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf)
Viet Thanh Nguyen, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other (Harvard University Press)
FICTION
Karen Russell, The Antidote (Knopf)
Katie Kitamura, Audition (Riverhead)
Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) (New Directions)
Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, We Do Not Part (Hogarth)
Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness (Mariner)
NONFICTION
Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Press)
Barbara Demick, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins (Random House)
Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press)
Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (Doubleday)
Gardiner Harris, No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson (Random House)
POETRY
Yuki Tanaka, Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon)
Rickey Laurentiis, Death of the First Idea (Knopf)
Kevin Young, Night Watch (Knopf)
Henri Cole, The Other Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Tolu Oloruntoba, Unravel (McClelland & Stewart)
BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION PRIZE
Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions) (Nonfiction)
Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, Heart Lamp (And Other Stories) (Fiction)
Hanna Stoltenberg, translated from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen, Near Distance (Biblioasis) (Fiction)
Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, Sad Tiger (Seven Stories) (Nonfiction)
Markus Werner, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, The Frog in the Throat (NYRB Classics) (Fiction)
Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, The Wax Child (New Directions) (Fiction)
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (Nonfiction)
Evanthia Bromiley, Crown (Grove) (Fiction)
Saou Ichikawa, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Hunchback (Hogarth) (Fiction)
Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria/One Signal) (Nonfiction)
Hedgie Choi, Salvage (University of Wisconsin Press) (Poetry)
Lucas Schaefer, The Slip (Simon & Schuster) (Fiction)
NBCC SERVICE AWARD
Elizabeth Taylor
NONA BALAKIAN CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN REVIEWING
Winner: Rhoda Feng
Finalists: Edna Bonhomme, Priscilla Gilman, Julia Klein, James Marcus
IVAN SANDROF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Frances FitzGerald
