The National Book Critics Circle, a nonprofit organization composed of 500 book critics and reviewers from across the country, recently announced the finalists for the 2005 book awards. The winners in each category—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, criticism, and biography—will be named on March 3.
The Finalists in Poetry
Simon Armitage for The Shout (Harcourt)
Blas Manuel de Luna for Bent to Earth (Carnegie Mellon University Press)
Jack Gilbert for Refusing Heaven (Knopf)
Richard Siken for Crush (Yale University Press)
Ron Slate for The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin)
The Finalists in Fiction
E.L. Doctorow for The March (Random House)
Mary Gaitskill for Veronica (Pantheon)
Kazuo Ishiguro for Never Let Me Go (Knopf)
Andrea Levy for Small Island (Picador)
William Vollmann for Europe Central (Viking)
The Finalists in Autobiography
Joan Didion for The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf)
Francine du Plessix Gray for Them: A Memoir of Parents (Penguin)
Judith Moore for Fat Girl: A True Story (Penguin)
Orhan Pamuk for Istanbul: Memories and the City (Knopf)
Vikram Seth for Two Lives (HarperColllins)
In addition, the organization’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Bill Henderson, the founder of Pushcart Press.
The winner of last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry was Adrienne Rich for The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (W.W. Norton), and the winner in fiction was Marilynne Robinson for Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
