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5 unusual facts about National Book Critics Circle Award


Blake Bailey

After publishing a long critical profile of Richard Yates, Bailey contracted to write a full-length biography of the novelist, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2005, Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on his biography, Cheever: A Life, which won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

George Dangerfield

In the UK and in Ireland, he collected material for his last book, The Damnable Question: A Study of Anglo-Irish Relations, which was a finalist in 1976 for the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.

Isabel Wilkerson

2010 National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction), winner, The Warmth of Other Suns

Rosemary Mahoney

The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China was a New York Times Notable Book in 1990, and Whoredom in Kimmage: The World of Irish Women, was a New York Times Notable book and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in 1994,


Anne Tyler

Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis.

Birchtown, Nova Scotia

The community's history was central to British historian Simon Schama's book Rough Crossings, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.


see also

Chelsea, Michigan

Laura Kasischke, National Book Critics Circle Award winner, poet, novelist

Walter Jay Skinner

Skinner is noted for his role in the groundwater contamination case out of Woburn, Massachusetts, which became the basis for the book A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for NonFiction, and the subsequent film of the same name starring John Travolta (in which Skinner was portrayed by John Lithgow).