Hanif Abdurraqib among National Book Critics Circle Award winners

Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House) took home the award for criticism from the National Book Critics Circle Awards at a ceremony at the New School in New York City on March 20. 

Released in 2024, the book uses sports as a launch point for the author to delve into countless subjects, including the nature of grief, what it means to love your home even when it fails you, and the various ways we can inevitably age into our parents.

“We are becoming alike in a lot of ways that I think I resisted for a long time,” Abdurraqib said of his father in a March 2024 interview with Matter News. “I was so beholden to the idea of becoming my mother, but I have ideas of my mother that aren’t really fully realized because she’s been gone for so long, to where I don’t even know what being like my mother means. Sure, I know these broad strokes, where from my mother I learned a level of sensitivity and a level of care and a level of emotional awareness. … But I have a much more concrete understanding of what it is to be like my father – my father who is incredibly curious, my father who chases down his obsessions to the end of the Earth, my father who is deeply observant and quietly considerate of a great many things.”

In a post on Instagram, Abdurraqib said he wasn’t prepared to give a speech when he was announced as a winner at NBCC – “I was eating animal crackers from a plastic baggie like an elementary school child [at the time],” he wrote – but that he was buoyed in that moment by “the ancestors and beloveds” he carries with him at all times, a number of whom grace the pages of There’s Always This Year.

The author opened his speech giving tribute to his mother, who would carve out time to write in between working two jobs, banging away noisily on her typewriter in the family’s East Side home. “And I would sometimes be carried to the edge of the steps by the sound … and I would look in the door as she wrote with her back to me,” he said. The pages of this unfinished novel would end up in a box in a closet after she died when Abdurraqib was 13 years old. “So, it is not ever lost on me that whenever there is a book with my name on it that enters the world, it is not only my name, it is our name. It is the name she chose for me to have and therefore it is a name she gets to be a part of. It is me carrying on her dreaming, whether she knows it or not.”

The NBCC awards are among the most coveted literary prizes in the United States, with winners chosen by book critics. In addition to criticism, awards are also given in categories such as biography, poetry, autobiography, and fiction, the latter of which also featured a Columbus connection this year owing to the nomination of Nora Lange’s Us Fools, which was released via local publisher Two Dollar Radio and was a finalist in the fiction category.

Abdurraqib’s win coincides with tomorrow’s paperback release of There’s Always This Year, which was also longlisted for both the National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. To celebrate the release, the author will be taking part in a book signing at Storyline Bookshop, 2108 Tremont Ctr. in Upper Arlington, beginning at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, March 25.

See a full list of NBCC award winners here.