Joan Silber, Frances FitzGerald win Critics Circle awards

“Improvement,” Joan Silber’s novel about interconnected lives spanning from Turkey to New York’s Harlem, won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. (Photo: Joan Silber website)

NEW YORK – “Improvement,” Joan Silber’s novel about interconnected lives spanning from Turkey to New York’s Harlem, won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction.

On a night when winners in all six competitive categories were women, Frances FitzGerald’s “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America” was honoured Thursday for nonfiction and Caroline Fraser’s book on Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Prairie Fires,” won for biography.

Silber has long been praised as a master of narrative, timing and capturing her characters’ inner lives. Her previous works include her acclaimed debut novel, “Household Words,” and the story collection “Ideas of Heaven.” FitzGerald, a celebrated journalist and author, is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the Vietnam War, “Fire in the Lake,” and for “Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her latest work was a National Book Award finalist last fall.

Others cited Thursday night included Layli Long Soldier in poetry for “Whereas,” Xiaolu Guo’s “Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China” for autobiography and Carina Chocano’s “You Play The Girl” for criticism.

National Book Critics Circle award finalists included two of last year’s most-talked about novels, Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing” and Mohsin Hamid’s bestselling “Exit West.”

The NBCC also presented a lifetime achievement award to prize-winning author-journalist John McPhee and cited author-critic Charles Finch for “excellence in reviewing.” Silber is among the authors Finch has praised. In a review last year in The Washington Post, he likened her to Alice Munro and Grace Paley and lamented that she was “too little loved, too little mentioned, beyond a small readership that seems to be composed mostly of other writers.” Carmen Maria Machado, author of the story collection “Her Body and Other Parties: Stories,” was given the John Leonard Prize for best debut book. Leonard, who died in 2008, was a founder of the National Book Critics Circle and had a long history of championing emerging writers.

The NBCC was founded in 1974 and is comprised of more than 700 critics and editors.