Roberto Bolano, Dexter Filkins Win Book Critics Awards

Posted on March 16, 2009

The winners for the annual National Book Critics Circle awards are in. In fiction, Roberto Bolano won posthumously for his novel 2666.

The National Book Critics Circle awarded the fiction prize to Bolano, the Chilean author who died in 2003; the award for general nonfiction to "The Forever War," Dexter Filkins' reporting on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the autobiography prize to Ariel Sabar's "My Father's Paradise," which traces the author's Jewish roots in Kurdish Iraq.
Sabar, who spoke of being an immigrant son's in 1980s Los Angeles, remembered growing up with a father who "looked funny," "talked funny" and "couldn't get his clothes to match." But he became deeply curious about his family's history and was struck by Iraq's long history of people of different faiths "who pretty much got along."

Here's a list of the winners:

Fiction: Roberto Bolano, 2666 (Farrar, Straus)
General Nonfiction: Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (Knopf)
Biograpy: Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Knopf)
Autobiography: Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin)
Poetry: Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
Poetry: August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Strauss)
Criticism: Seth Lerer, Children's Literature: A Reader�s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press)

You can also see a list of the winners here.