“Hamnet,” a novel by Maggie O’Farrell that imagines the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son during the bubonic plague, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction on Thursday.
Founded in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle is comprised of more than 600 literary critics and book review publishers in the United States. The organization’s annual awards, which are usually awarded in the spring to works published in the previous year, are unusual because book critics, rather than authors or academics, select the winners. The awards are open to any book published in English in the United States.
O’Farrell, author of eight other books, became obsessed with the story of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet when she was studying English at Cambridge University. In her novel, she brought it up “so vividly that the reader is hit by its loss,” said one of the award’s judges, Colette Bancroft, in a quote.
Raven Leilani won the John Leonard Award, which recognizes a debuting author, for his novel “Luster”, about a young black woman who works with publishers and moves in with her lover, an older married man and his family.
The nonfiction prize went to journalist Tom Zoellner for “Island on fire: the uprising that ended slavery in the British Empire”, an account of the 1831 uprising that led to the abolition of slavery in Jamaica.
In a year when many new novels and serious nonfiction works were overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and the presidential election, literary awards helped to draw attention to some of them. The prizes were handed out virtually on Thursday night. Last year’s ceremony, which was due to take place in March as soon as the severity of the pandemic became clear, was canceled and the winners were celebrated during a virtual ceremony in January.
The poet Cathy Park Hong won the autobiography award for “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning”, a collection of essays that explores race, culture and her experiences as an American writer and Korean. In her acceptance speech, she dedicated her award to the memory of women of Asian descent who were killed in the Atlanta shooting last week, and read their names out loud.
The biography award went to Amy Stanley’s “Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World,” which examines the life of a 19th-century Japanese woman.
Other honorees this year include Nicole Fleetwood, who won the critical award for her book “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Encarceration”; francine j. Harris, who received the poetry award for his collection, “Here Is the Sweet Hand”; and Jo Livingstone, editor of the New Republic culture team, who won the Ninth Balakian Mention for Excellence in Review.
The Ivan Sandrof award for her work as a whole went to Feminist Press, founded 50 years ago and which published authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anita Hill, Grace Paley and Barbara Ehrenreich, as well as members of the activist punk band Pussy Riot. In a quote from a judge, Michael Schaub, the committee chairman, said that the Feminist Press has fulfilled its mission statement, which includes the publication of “insurgent and marginalized voices from around the world to build a fairer future”.
“Their literature over the past five decades has made the world a better place for everyone,” he said.