Arundhati Roy wins big at National Book Critics Circle Awards
What's the story
Indian author Arundhati Roy and South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang were among the winners at the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy's memoir, won in the autobiography category while Kang's We Do Not Part bagged the fiction award. The annual event recognizes outstanding works published in America over the past year.
Memoir's acclaim
Roy's growing international recognition
Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me has been steadily gaining recognition on the international book circuit. The memoir, which chronicles her tumultuous relationship with her mother, feminist educator Mary Roy, was recently shortlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction. It is published in the US by Scribner (part of Simon & Schuster), a publisher known for literary giants like Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King.
Fiction award
Kang's latest win adds to her accolades
Kang's We Do Not Part, translated by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, revisits a 1948-49 uprising on Jeju Island. Heather Scott Partington, chair of the fiction committee, described it as "a work of blinding melancholy, bleak weather, and murmuring syntax" that "lingers like an atmospheric and arresting dream." This win adds to Kang's growing list of accolades since she became the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.
Non-fiction prize
Other winners and their categories
Karen Hao won the non-fiction prize for her investigation Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. The book explores the company behind ChatGPT, which has been at the center of intense global debate. Neige Sinno won the translation prize for Sad Tiger, translated into English from French by Natasha Lehrer. Other winners included Alex Green (biography), Kevin Young (poetry), and Quinn Slobodian (criticism).
Award history
Lifetime achievement award for Frances FitzGerald
Founded in New York in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle comprises over 850 critics and editors. Its annual awards are considered one of the most prestigious recognitions in the literary world. The awards also recognized journalist and author Frances FitzGerald with a lifetime achievement honor for her prescient account of the Vietnam War in her 1972 book Fire in the Lake.