Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Hamnet’ wins book critics award for fiction

Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” an imagined take at the death of Shakespeare’s son from the bubonic plague, has received the National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction.
“Hamnet,” an unluckily well-timed story for this pandemic, explores the effect of the boy’s illness and death on his family. He changed into Shakespeare’s only son, and scholars have long speculated about his influence — if any — on “Hamlet,” which Shakespeare worked on withinside the years following Hamnet’s death.
Tom Zoellner’s “Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery withinside the British Empire” received for nonfiction, and Amy Stanley’s “Stranger withinside the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World” changed into the winner in biography.
The autobiography award went to Cathy Park Hong for “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.”
Other winners announced during Thursday night’s digital ceremony along with Francine j. harris’ “Here Is the Sweet Hand” for poetry and Nicole Fleetwood’s “Marking Time: Art withinside the Age of Mass Incarceration” for criticism. Raven Leilani got the John Leonard Prize for the best first book for her novel “Luster.”
Career achievement awards had been presented to New Republic author Jo Livingstone for “excellence in reviewing” and to the Feminist Press for its long records of championing women’s equality, publishing authors starting from Grace Paley to Anita Hill to Pussy Riot.
The book critics circle changed into based in 1974 and has lots of members across the country. This year’s awards are the first because of the departure of several NBCC board members past summer in the wake of a dispute over the organisation’s response to the killing of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matters protests. The leadership introduced in numerous new members and convinced a few who had resigned to stay on, resulting, in line with the critics’ circle, in “the most diverse board in NBCC records and one of the most experienced.”