National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
2025 Shortlist & Longlist
Complete History
2020s
- 2025No winner recorded
- 2024Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar — Cynthia Carr
- 2023Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage — Jonny Steinberg
- 2022G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century — Beverly Gage
- 2021All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler — Rebecca Donner
- 2020Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World — Amy Stanley
2010s
- 2019The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
- 2018Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
- 2017Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder — Caroline Fraser
- 2016Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
- 2015Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
- 2014Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
- 2013Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
- 2012The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV — Robert Caro
- 2011George F. Kennan: An American Life — John Lewis Gaddis
- 2010How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
About the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography honors outstanding works of biography—and, where the NBCC separates the categories, memoir and autobiography—published in English in the United States. The NBCC has recognized biography as a distinct category since its founding in 1975, and over the decades the prize has been awarded to major biographies of literary, historical, political, and cultural figures.
Winners have included towering works such as Robert A. Caro's The Passage of Power (2012), Ruth Franklin's Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016), Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017), and Beverly Gage's G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (2022). The award values rigorous research, elegant prose, and original contributions to our understanding of its subjects.
The NBCC board of 24 professional critics votes on the prize, which is announced at the NBCC Awards ceremony each March. Five finalists are typically named in January. While the award carries no cash prize, it confers enormous prestige and has a strong track record of anticipating or reflecting other major prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The NBCC also administers a separate Autobiography/Memoir category, and the two categories occasionally overlap in what they recognize.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The NBCC separates biography (life stories of another person) from autobiography/memoir (first-person accounts of the author's own life). Both have distinct award tracks at the NBCC, though the line can blur in hybrid works.
- The 24 rotating board members of the National Book Critics Circle—all professional book review editors and critics—vote on the award through a deliberative process culminating in a final vote.
- No. The award is a recognition prize with no monetary component.
- Finalists are announced in January; the winner is revealed at the NBCC Awards ceremony in March in New York City.
- Yes. The NBCC places no restriction on whether the subject is living or deceased. Works about both living and historical figures have won.
- The NBCC does not exclude graphic works and has previously honored hybrid non-fiction in other categories, but the biography category winners have typically been traditional prose biographies.
- Both are prestigious American awards for biography, but the NBCC is chosen entirely by professional critics, while the Pulitzer is juried by a separate appointed board. They occasionally overlap in their choices, and a win or nomination for one often accompanies consideration for the other.