Joyce Carol Oates Nominated for Two NBCC Book Awards

by Staff
1.14.08

On Saturday, the National Book Critics Circle, a nonprofit organization composed of seven hundred book critics and reviewers from across the country, announced the finalists for the 2007 book awards. The winners in each category—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, criticism, and biography—will be named on March 6 at an awards ceremony in New York City.

The Finalists in Poetry
Mary Jo Bang for Elegy (Graywolf)
Matthea Harvey for Modern Life (Graywolf)
Michael O’Brien for Sleeping and Waking (Flood Editions)
Tom Pickard for The Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood Editions)
Tadeusz Rozewicz for New Poems (Archipelago)

The Finalists in Fiction
Vikram Chandra for Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
Junot Díaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
Hisham Matar for In the Country of Men (Dial Press)
Joyce Carol Oates for The Gravedigger’s Daughter (HarperCollins)
Marianne Wiggins for The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster)

The Finalists in Autobiography
Joyce Carol Oates for The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco)
Joshua Clark for Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
Edwidge Danticat for Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
Sara Paretsky for Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
Anna Politkovskaya for A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia (Random House)

The organization's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to writer and editor Emilie Buchwald, who is also the founder and publisher emeritus of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis.

The winner of last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry was Troy Jollimore for Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House), and the winner in fiction was Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic).