Nominees for the annual National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced on January 28. In poetry, the nominees are Louise Glück for The Seven Ages (Ecco/HarperCollins), Albert Goldbarth for Saving Lives (Ohio State University), Bob Hicok for Animal Soul (Invisible Cities), Jane Hirshfield for Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins), and Czeslaw Milosz for A Treatise on Poetry (Ecco/HarperCollins).
In fiction, the nominees are Jonathan Franzen for The Corrections (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Alice Munro for Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Knopf), Anne Patchett for Bel Canto (HarperCollins), W.G. Sebald for Austerlitz (Random House), and Colson Whitehead for John Henry Days (Doubleday).
The Ivan Sandorf Lifetime Achievement Award will be given to Jason Epstein, who was the editorial director of Random House before retiring in 1998. Epstein is also the founder of the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature, and a cofounder of The New York Review of Books.
The nominees, including those in the general nonfiction, biography/autobiography, and criticism categories, will read from their works at the Tishman Auditorium at New York University Law School on March 10. The winners will be announced on March 11.
In 2001, Judy Jordan won in the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for Carolina Ghost Woods (Louisiana State University) and Jim Crace won in fiction for Being Dead (FSG).
