The National Book Critics Circle Awards for the 2025 publishing year were presented at a ceremony at the New School in Manhattan on March 26. Throughout the ceremony, both the recent closure of the Washington Post’s books section and the ongoing battle between AI companies and publishers loomed large over the remarks of the evening’s winners and presenters.

NBCC president Adam Dalva kicked off the night by acknowledging that our current political moment is one in which “the very concept of the free press is under attack. And yet here we are, defiantly carrying on the NBCC’s mission: to seek the right for our members, and for critics around the world, to think freely.”

Alluding to shrinking literary coverage at newspapers and magazines around the country, Dalva added, “A robust vibrant books section has a downstream effect: the more we write the more change we can enact creatively and practically.”

Dalva also mentioned that the all-volunteer NBCC judges read some 1,000 books in their deliberations for this year’s prizes.

The first award of the evening was the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, which went to Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer (Seven Stories). In a video message, Sinno said, “I am especially grateful because I know that book critics don’t focus only on the stories that are told in books, they are sensitive to the form, which makes me happy in this case because… I myself am very interested and focused on the form when I work.”

Lehrer, in a subsequent message, acknowledged that it was a “weighty responsibility and also a great privilege to translate Sad Tiger,” and thanked publisher Dan Simon and the Seven Stories team “for championing such an unusual and difficult book and giving English speakers the opportunity to read it.”

Nicholas Boggs was named the the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book for Baldwin: A Love Story (FSG). After thanking his editor Jonathan Galassi, he remarked that “it’s been really a beautiful thing to see how Baldwin’s work has been reevaluated and reclaimed by a new generation.” He continued: “I’m very honored to have played a small role in that, and I’m very honored that NBCC chose a first book that took 20 years to write.”

The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to an NBCC member for exceptional critical work, went to Rhoda Feng, who delivered one of the ceremony’s most riveting speeches. “When critical spaces vanish the conversation around books inevitably contracts with them,” she said, and later noted that former Washington Post book critics Ron Charles and Becca Rothfeld are previous recipients of the prize.

“Because they continue to be unsurpassed technologies for rearranging the furniture of one’s mind,” she declared, “books—I feel confident in proclaiming—will keep appearing in the world and as long as they do there will be readers trying to figure out what they mean and how they mean.”

The Toni Morrison Achievement Award, which honors institutions that have made significant contributions to book culture, was jointly awarded to NPR and PBS.

Sylvia Bugg, chief programming executive and general manager for PBS, accepted via video, saying that stories have “the power to change how we see the world and each other.” NPR’s VP of cultural programming Yolanda Sangweni and Adriana Gallardo, an editor with Morning Edition who oversees books coverage, accepted the award in person, with Gallardo declaring that NPR is “dedicated to nourishing the intellectual curiosity of audiences worldwide.”

The winner for poetry was Kevin Young for Night Watch (Knopf). In his speech, Young remarked that he worked on the collection for 16 years and “almost didn’t publish it,” fearing it was too dark—until the pandemic happened. He also thanked his longtime editor Deb Garrison, who he has worked with for 25 years.

Quinn Slobodian won the criticism award for Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Zone) and, in accepting the prize, thanked Zone publisher and his editor Michel Fehrer. He also declared this to be “a perilous time for the written word.”

“All of our work has been plundered by tech companies,” Slobodian said. “The ironclad copyright laws that seemed to once have been so important have been seemingly set aside so that Anthropic and OpenAI could consume everything that humans have created… This is a time when we need to be guardians, of course, of the written word and everyone in this room is one.

Arundhati Roy won the autobiography award for Mother Mary Comes to Me (Scribner). Nan Graham, SVP and publisher-at-large for Scribner, accepted the award on her behalf. “She is the bravest woman I know, and she loves people who help her find readers, and that is you,” she said of Roy, addressing the NBCC. “An award makes a book last longer, and I am so grateful to you for making this book last longer. “

The biography award went to Alex Green, former PW New England correspondent and author of A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America's Disabled (Bellevue). In an emotional speech, Green recounted a correspondence he had with the poet Donald Revell, in which Revell, citing the poet Bob Creeley, said that “the conversation of poetry is poetry.” “I think that’s true for this amazing literary culture,” Green said, “and that conversation is really the NBCC’s doing.”

Karen Hao won the nonfiction award for Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI (Penguin Press). In pre-recorded video remarks, Hao said she “can’t help but be disturbed by how the themes of this book have grown more relevant by the day.” But she also declared hat “it’s not the time to despair.”

“I’ve never been more hopeful of our chance to advance a different future…” Hao said. “To celebrate the written word is one radical act of resistance against the imperial project that seeks to strip us of those words and of our humanity.”

Closing out the night, Nobel laureate Han Kang was awrded the fiction award for We Do Not Part, translated from the Korean by e.yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth). David Ebershoff, VP and editor-in-chief of Hogarth, accepted the award on her behalf. In Han’s prepared remarks, she noted that the novel, about the 1948 Jeju Massacre, took her seven years to write.

“In this book there are the ones who have resolved not to bid farewell,” said Han, via Ebershoff. “Instead of the impossible farewell, they choose to stay within tenacious mourning. They light candles below the sea in the pitch black plunge of the night. I still hope to believe in the blinking light which we have in us and move forward holding it with tenacity, hopefully.”