The British made a strong showing at the National Book Critics’ Circle awards this year.
The NBCC is a non-profit organization of editors and critics based in New York, and accepts nominations and submissions from authors worldwide, as long as the material is published in the U.S.
Three of the six prizes awarded at the March ceremony were to British authors: Hilary Mantel, Richard Holmes and Diana Athill.
Hilary Mantel’s win was for Wolf Hall, which also garnered the prestigious Man Booker prize last year. She is working on a sequel to Wolf Hall, an historical novel about Thomas Cromwell; she says that she originally intended to combine the two, but publishers in both the U.K. and the U.S. encouraged her to start a second volume.
Mantel said that she is surprised and pleased at the reaction of U.S. readers to her perspective on the Tudor era in British history and Cromwell’s part in it.
Richard Holmes took the prize for non-fiction with The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. His book, which focuses on notable British scientists around the turn of the 19th century, explores the relationship between romance and science in a new and engrossing approach.
Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End, written about the late stages of her life, won in the autobiography category. She is now 91 years old, and wonderfully feisty and “unmawkish” in her attitudes and commentary.
In one interview, Mantel expressed her gratification about the choices made by the NBCC. She feels that the Association’s board of reviewers provides an impartial and perceptive judgment offered by professionals in the field.
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