National Book Critics Circle Announces 2007 Award Winners

The National Book Critics Circle chose Junot Diaz's debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books) as the winner of its 2007 award for fiction. The announcement was made at NBCC's 34th annual awards, on Thursday, March 6, at the New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City.

Other winners announced last night were:

• Autobiography: Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf)

• Biography: Tim Jeal's Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)

• Poetry: Mary Jo Bang's Elegy (Graywolf Press)

• Nonfiction: Harriet Washington's Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)

• Criticism: Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (FSG)

The ceremony also featured the presentation of the Nona Citation for Excellence in Reviewing to Sam Anderson of New York Magazine. And Emilie Buchwald, editor, writer, and founder of Milkweed Editions, was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.