The winners of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced on Thursday and Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the fiction prize.
According to The Associated Press, she won for her novel Americanah, which is about you a young woman who goes to America seeking a college education and deals with identity and race issues.
She managed to beat out Donna Tartt and three others for the fiction prize. Americanah isn't Adichie's first work, she previously wrote Half of a Yellow Sun.
Adichie spoke with the Los Angeles Times last summer about her writing and said, "I feel as though being African, I can laugh at certain things that maybe if I were African American I wouldn't."
The Times reports that Sheri Fink won the nonfiction prize for her book that followed New Orleans' Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, called Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital.
The autobiography prize went to Amy Wilentz for Farewell, Fred Voodoo. She wrote about her experiences while reporting on Haiti following the 2010 earthquake.
Frank Bidart's Metaphysical Dog won the poetry award. The criticism award was given to Franco Moretti for Distant Reading. Other awards handed out include The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, which went to Katherine A. Powers and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
Lastly, Anthony Marra was awarded the new John Leonard Prize, which is given to a first book, for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
