The 6 Winners Of A Major Literary Award Were Just Announced — & They're All Women

Friday morning saw good news on the diversity-in-publishing front as book nerds learned that all six of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award winners are women. One of three other achievement prizes, the John Leonard Prize, went to a woman, Carmen Maria Machado, for Her Body and Other Parties. The winners were announced at an event on Thursday night at the New School's Tishman Auditorium in Manhattan.

Taken as a whole, women won just as many awards from the National Book Critics Circle in 2017 as in 2016. Last year, women authors took home four of the main awards — Fiction, Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism — and the three achievement awards went to Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing), Margaret Atwood (Hag-Seed), and Michelle Dean (Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion). At the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Awards, women authors took home all six of the main awards — the four mentioned above, plus the awards for Nonfiction and Poetry — but two of the achievement honors, the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, went to Charles Finch (The Woman in the Water) and John McPhee (Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process), respectively.

The winners of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Awards are Joan Silber (Improvement), Frances FitzGerald (The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America), Carina Chocano (You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks & Other Mixed Messages), Layli Long Soldier (Whereas), Xiaolu Guo (Nine Continents: A Memoir in and out of China), and Caroline Fraser (Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder).

Several of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award winners have been previously nominated for literary prizes. Frances FitzGerald's The Evangelicals was nominated for the 2017 Cundill History Prize, and Carina Chocano's You Play the Girl was nominated for the 2017 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Layli Long Soldier's Whereas won the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was nominated for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry.

Notable women writers among the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award finalists include Arundhati Roy and Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing), who were considered for the Fiction prize; Masha Gessen and Kapka Kassabova, who were considered for the Nonfiction prize; Edwidge Danticat and Valeria Luiselli , who were considered for the Criticism prize; Nuar Alsadir, who was considered for the Poetry prize; and Thi Bui and Roxane Gay, who were considered for the Autobiography prize.

Which of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Awards have you read? Let's talk about them on Twitter!