NEWS

Abdurraqib, Harris, Solnit, Whitehead Among PRH’s 8 NBCC Award Finalists

Penguin Random House will be competitive in the Fiction, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Biography, and John Leonard Prize categories for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Awards, whose nominees were announced on Thursday, January 20.

Here are ours:

Fiction

• HARLEM SHUFFLE by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

Nonfiction

• EMPIRE OF PAIN: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)
• ORWELL’S ROSES by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

Autobiography

• A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA: Notes In Praise Of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)
• CONCEPCION: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes by Albert Samaha (Riverhead)

Biography

• MIKE NICHOLS: A Life by Mark Harris (Penguin Press)
• FIERCE POISE: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov (Penguin Press)

John Leonard Prize (Best First Book)

• DETRANSITION, BABY by Torrey Peters (One World)

And from our PRHPS client publishers:

Fiction: THE NETANYAHUS by Joshua Cohen (New York Review Books)

Biography: UNTIL I AM FREE: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain (Beacon Press)

Criticism: EVERYTHING AND LESS: The Novel in the Age of Amazon by Mark McGurl (Verso)

John Leonard Prize: POP SONG: Adventures in Art and Intimacy by Larissa Pham (Catapult)

To view the complete list of NBCC Award finalists, click here.

The winners will be announced on March 17 in a virtual ceremony that will be free and open to the public.

Founded in 1974, the NBCC now comprises more than 1,000 working critics and book-review editors throughout the country, who annually vote and bestow its awards in six categories, honoring the best books published in the past year in the United States.

Congratulations and good fortune to our nominees and their publishing teams.