Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: National Book Critics Circle Nominees

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.   

The National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists were announced, one category at a time, all this week. You can see the full announcement here and the specific category announcements in the linked list below.

Since 1974, the NBCC, made up of mostly literary critics, honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature. 

The 2025 finalists are in 8 categories are:

• Fiction
• Nonfiction
• Biography 
• Autobiography
• Poetry
• Criticism
• Gregg Barrios Book in Translation

The separation of nonfiction, biography, and autobiography not only allows for more nonfiction to be honored, but is acknowledges the big difference between biography and autobiography both the obvious distinction of how it is written and the fact that the appeal for readers is different as well.

I always like comparing the National Book Award finalists to the NBCC. They are fairly similar, but you can see distinctions, especially if you follow reviews as I do. The NBA is chosen by a group of mostly authors, while the NBCC is driven by the critics. You can especially see trends emerging over time if you look at both. Thankfully, both awards make the backlist easy to access. [There is a box on the top right gutter of the "Awards" page for the NBCC.]

This year for example, while some of the fiction books on the longlists overlap, the National Book Award Winner is not even on the NBCC list, the other nominees are all different. This is great because it gives you many more "best" options for readers. Add in the Booker Prize and you get the big picture view of the best books published in English in any given year.

While "best" books aren't always the most popular with readers, they are the harbinger of larger movements. For example, as award finalists have gotten more diverse, the demand for more titles by marginalized voices has made it way into the conversation about all books.

So use this award list as a resource, as I note in the introduction to this post above, but also, think about grouping similar awards together, consider their backlists from the last 5 years (NBCC has easy access here), and see if you can notice a few trends or changes yourself. When we embrace trends and larger movements as they are developing, we show our patrons we understand them. Anticipating what they want is not that hard if you pay attention and it leads to more check outs.

Editor's note: The blog will return on Monday (12/22) with some library specific year in review content and then on Tuesday (12/23) I will end the year of posts with my Best Books Becky Read in 2025. After that, the blog will be on vacation, returning Monday, January 5, 2026.