National Book Critics Circle announces its winners for the publishing year 2009

On Thursday, March 11, 2010 the National Book Critics Circle announced its award winners for the publishing year 2009. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (Holt) won the fiction award. The poetry award went to Rae Armantrout's Versed (Wesleyan University Press). The nonfiction award went to Richard Holmes for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon). The criticism award was given to Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf). In biography, Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life (Knopf) won. In autobiography, the board honored Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End (Norton).