NBCC Announces 2023 Awards Finalists

2023 NBCC Awards Finalist – Biography

A deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela’s relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela that “does justice both to the couple’s political heroism and to the betrayals and the secrets that hounded their union” (The New Yorker).

2023 NBCC Awards Finalist – Fiction

A startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.

2023 NBCC Awards Finalist – Fiction

A thrilling novel about a triple homicide that dredges up unsettling memories from a lawyer’s childhood. Vengeance Is Mine is a dreamlike portrait of a woman afflicted by failing memories and a tortured uncertainty about her own past that threatens to become her undoing.

2023 NBCC Awards Finalist – Nonfiction

A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.

2023 NBCC Awards Finalist – Nonfiction

Robyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. “An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.” —New York Review of Books.

2023 NBCC Awards Finalist – John Leonard Prize

The story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil’s homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

2023 NBCC Awards Finalist – John Leonard Prize

A “vivid and frank” (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a community’s ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic. Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, When Crack Was King is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.