On Thursday, March 8, at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium, The National Book Critic Circle presented its awards for publishing year 2011.

Founded in 1974, the NBCC is a nonprofit organization of book reviewers and critics that honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature, in part through annual awards for the year’s outstanding books. Books are directly nominated and chosen by leading book critics. The NBCC thus offers the unique opportunity for professional critics to recognize and reward literary excellence.

For more information about the National Book Critics Circle and the National Book Critics Circle Awards, go to http://bookcritics.org/.

2011 Winners

Fiction
BINOCULAR VISION by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books)

Nonfiction
LIBERTY'S EXILES: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War by Maya Jasanoff (Knopf)

Autobiography
THE MEMORY PALACE by Mira Bartók (Free Press)

Biography
GEORGE F. KENNAN: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin Press)

Criticism
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE HUMAN CONDITION: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer (Graywolf)

Poetry
SPACE, IN CHAINS by Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon Press)

2011 Finalists

Fiction
OPEN CITY by Teju Cole (Random House)
THE MARRIAGE PLOT by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
THE STRANGER'S CHILD by Alan Hollinghurst (Knopf)
BINOCULAR VISION by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books)
STONE ARABIA by Dana Spiotta (Scribner)

Nonfiction
A WORLD ON FIRE: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman (Random)
THE INFORMATION by James Gleick (Pantheon)
TO END ALL WARS: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
LIBERTY'S EXILES: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War by Maya Jasanoff (Knopf)
PULPHEAD: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

Autobiography
ONE HUNDRED NAMES FOR LOVE: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing by Diane Ackerman (W.W. Norton)
THE MEMORY PALACE by Mira Bartók (Free Press)
HARLEM IS NOWHERE: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Little, Brown)
IT CALLS YOU BACK: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing by Luis J. Rodríguez (Touchstone)
REVOLUTION: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War by Deb Olin Unferth (Henry Holt)

Biography
LOVE AND CAPITAL: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution by Mary Gabriel (Little, Brown)
GEORGE F. KENNAN: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin Press)
HEMINGWAY'S BOAT: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 by Paul Hendrickson (Knopf)
MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable (Viking)
DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA by Ezra F. Vogel (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)

Criticism
IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos (Faber & Faber)
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE HUMAN CONDITION: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer (Graywolf)
THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday)
KARAOKE CULTURE by Dubravka Ugresic (Open Letter)
OUT OF THE VINYL DEEPS: Ellen Willis on Rock Music by Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota Press)

Poetry
CORE SAMPLE FROM THE WORLD by Forrest Gander (New Directions)
KINGDOM ANIMALIA by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions)
SPACE, IN CHAINS by Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon Press)
THE CHAMELEON COUCH by Yusef Komunyakaa (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
DEVOTIONS by Bruce Smith (University of Chicago Press)