National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction — Complete Winners List

51 years of winners · National Book Critics Circle · Since 1975 · ← Back to award page

Year	Title	Author	Publisher
2024	Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space	Adam Higginbotham	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2023	We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America	Roxanna Asgarian	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2022	The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act	—	Bloomsbury Publishing
2021	How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America	Clint Smith	Little, Brown
2020	Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire	—	Harvard University Press
2019	Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland	Patrick Radden Keefe	Doubleday
2018	Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan	—	Penguin Press
2017	The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America	—	Simon & Schuster
2016	Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City	Matthew Desmond	Crown Publishers
2015	Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic	—	Bloomsbury Press
2014	The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation	—	Knopf
2013	Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital	—	Crown Publishers
2012	Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity	Andrew Solomon	Scribner
2011	Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World	—	Knopf
2010	The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration	Isabel Wilkerson	Random House
2009	The Age of Wonder	Richard Holmes	—
2008	The Forever War	Dexter Filkins	—
2007	Medical Apartheid	Harriet A. Washington	—
2006	Rough Crossings	Simon Schama	—
2005	Voices from Chernobyl	Svetlana Alexievich	—
2004	The Reformation: A History	Diarmaid MacCulloch	—
2003	Sons of Mississippi	Paul Hendrickson	—
2002	A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide	Samantha Power	—
2001	Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper	Nicholson Baker	—
2000	Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing	Ted Conover	—
1999	Time, Love, Memory	Jonathan Weiner	—
1998	We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families	Philip Gourevitch	—
1997	The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down	Anne Fadiman	—
1996	Bad Land: An American Romance	Jonathan Raban	—
1995	A Civil Action	Jonathan Harr	—
1994	The Rape of Europa	Lynn H. Nicholas	—
1993	The Land Where the Blues Began	Alan Lomax	—
1992	Young Men and Fire	Norman Maclean	—
1991	Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women	Susan Faludi	—
1990	The Content of Our Character	Shelby Steele	—
1989	The Broken Cord	Michael Dorris	—
1988	Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63	Taylor Branch	—
1987	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	Richard Rhodes	—
1986	Arctic Dreams	Barry Lopez	—
1985	Common Ground	J. Anthony Lukas	—
1984	Weapons and Hope	Freeman Dyson	—
1983	The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House	Seymour M. Hersh	—
1982	The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson	Robert Caro	—
1981	The Mismeasure of Man	Stephen Jay Gould	—
1980	Walter Lippmann and the American Century	Ronald Steel	—
1979	Munich: The Price of Peace	Telford Taylor	—
1978	Facts of Life	Maureen Howard	—
1977	Samuel Johnson	W. Jackson Bate	—
1976	The Woman Warrior	Maxine Hong Kingston	—
1975	Edith Wharton: A Biography	R. W. B. Lewis	—