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National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
2025 Shortlist & Longlist
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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
2000s
- 2009Cheever: A Life — Blake Bailey
- 2008The World is What it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul — Patrick French
- 2007Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer — Tim Jeal
- 2006James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon — Julie Phillips
- 2005American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer — Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
- 2004de Kooning: An American Master — Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
- 2003Khrushchev: The Man and His Era — William Taubman
- 2002Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Vol. II — Janet Browne
- 2001Boswell's Presumptuous Task — Adam Sisman
- 2000Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan — Herbert P. Bix
1990s
- 1999The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White — Henry Wiencek
- 1998A Beautiful Mind — Sylvia Nasar
- 1997Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II — James Tobin
- 1996Angela's Ashes — Frank McCourt
- 1995Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson — Robert Polito
- 1994Shot in the Heart — Mikal Gilmore
- 1993Genet — Edmund White
- 1992Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World — Carol Brightman
- 1991Patrimony: A True Story — Philip Roth
- 1990Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. II — Robert A. Caro
1980s
- 1989A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt — Geoffrey C. Ward
- 1988Oscar Wilde — Richard Ellmann
- 1987Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World — Donald R. Howard
- 1986The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I: 1902-1941 — Arnold Rampersad
- 1985Henry James: A Life — Leon Edel
- 1984Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 — Joseph Frank
- 1983Minor Characters — Joyce Johnson
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.