Critics Honor Posthumous Memoir by Russian Navalny

A posthumous memoir by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Hisham Matar's novel “My Friends” and a poetry collection by Anne Carson were among the winners Thursday night of the 50th annual National Book Critics Circle awards.

Winner in the autobiography category, Navalny's ”Patriot," which came out eight months after he died in prison, was a blunt and improbable optimistic account of his years of oppression and confinement. Alfred A. Knopf publisher Jordan Pavlin accepted the award on his behalf, telling hundreds gathered at the New School Auditorium in Manhattan that ‘’it was very difficult to conceive of a leader as committed to his country, his people and ideals as Navalny was."

Her voice sometimes halting with emotion, Pavlin called his book “uncannily relevant to America in 2025.”

Winners of the other categories:

— Matar's contrasting narratives of three Libyans living in London won for fiction, with finalists including Percival Everett's “James,” winner of the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize.

— Adam Higginbotham’s “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” won for nonfiction.

— Carson's collection “Wrong Norma” won poetry.

— Cynthia Carr’s “Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar" won for biography

— Hanif Abdurraqib's “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” won for criticism

— Pedro Lemebel's “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles,” translated from the Spanish by Gwendolyn Harper, won for a work in translation.

— Tessa Hulls' “Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir” won the John Leonard Prize for best debut book. Leonard, a renowned critic who died in 2008, helped found the NBCC in 1974.

Honorary awards were presented to “The House On Mango Street” author Sandra Cisneros, the Black-owned publisher Third World Press, critic Lauren Michele Jackson and author-educator Lori Lynn Turner. Maxine Hong Kingston, whose classic “The Woman Warrior” received an NBCC award in 1977, was a keynote speaker.