Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz: NBCC 2007 Awardees

In a bountiful year of remarkable books, two Caribbean-born writers, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz won National Book Critics Circle Awards for Autobiography and Fiction at the New School's Tischman Auditorium on March 6, 2008.

The competition in both areas was intense, yet Edwidge and Junot emerged as awardees from among these other fine authors:

Autobiography

Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf)
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco Press)
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia (Random House)

Fiction

Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books)
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (Dial Press)
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco Press)
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster)

Congratulations, Edwidge and Junot!

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(Via Critical Mass)
Pictured above: NBCC member Miriam Berkley shot this group portrait of the winners of the NBCC 2007 awards. From left,Tim Jeal, NBCC award winner in biography for "Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer" (Yale University Press), Mary Jo Bang, NBCC award winner in poetry for "Elegy" (Gray Wolf PresS), Alex Ross,NBCC award winner in criticism for "The Rest Is Noise" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Edwidge Danticat,NBCC award winner in autobiography (Knopf), Emilie Buchwald of Milkweed Press, winner of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award; Sam Anderson,winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Margaret Washington, NBCC award winner in nonfiction for "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday). Not pictured, NBCC award winner in fiction, Junot Diaz, author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (Riverhead Books).

For the complete list of winners, please follow this link to Critical Mass: 2007 NBCC Winners Announced