Award overlap
Books That Won Both the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the PEN America Literary Awards
12 books won both the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the PEN America Literary Awards between 2008 and 2023, most recently Night of the Living Rez (2022/2023). 70 more were recognized by both without winning both.
Years are award years. National Book Critics Circle Awards · PEN America Literary Awards
Won both
| Book | Author | National Book Critics Circle Awards | PEN America Literary Awards |
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| Night of the Living Rez | Morgan Talty |
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| All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler | Rebecca Donner |
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| frank: sonnets | Diane Seuss |
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| Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World | Amy Stanley |
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| Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals | Saidiya Hartman |
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| There There | Tommy Orange |
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| WHEREAS | Layli Long Soldier |
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| Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Matthew Desmond |
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| Homegoing | Yaa Gyasi |
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| Citizen: An American Lyric | Claudia Rankine |
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| Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital | Sheri Fink |
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| 2666 | Roberto Bolaño |
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Recognized by both
| Book | Author | National Book Critics Circle Awards | PEN America Literary Awards |
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| Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar | Cynthia Carr |
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| Reagan: His Life and Legend | Max Boot |
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| The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq | Steve Coll |
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| Yard Show | Janice N. Harrington |
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| A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast | Dorthe Nors |
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| An Immense World | Ed Yong |
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| Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands | Kelly Lytle Hernandez |
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| Dr. No | Percival Everett |
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| G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century | Beverly Gage |
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| Milkweed Smithereens | Bernadette Mayer |
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| Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century | Jennifer Homans |
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| A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance | Hanif Abdurraqib |
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| Detransition, Baby: A Novel | Torrey Peters |
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| How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America | Clint Smith |
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| Orwell’s Roses | Rebecca Solnit |
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| The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel | Honorée Fanonne Jeffers |
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| Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents | Isabel Wilkerson |
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| How Much of These Hills Is Gold: A Novel | C Pam Zhang |
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| How to Pronounce Knife: Stories | Souvankham Thammavongsa |
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| Luster: A Novel | Raven Leilani |
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| Obit | Victoria Chang |
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| Shuggie Bain: A Novel | Douglas Stuart |
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| The Yellow House | Sarah M. Broom |
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| Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader | Vivian Gornick |
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| Deaf Republic | Ilya Kaminsky |
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| Lot | Bryan Washington |
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| Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion | Jia Tolentino |
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| Educated: A Memoir | Tara Westover |
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| Feel Free | Zadie Smith |
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| The Carrying: Poems | Ada Limón |
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| Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News | Kevin Young |
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| Her Body and Other Parties: Stories | Carmen Maria Machado |
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| You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages | Carina Chocano |
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| Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary | Joe Jackson |
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| Blackacre | Monica Youn |
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| Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right | Jane Mayer |
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| Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic | Sam Quinones |
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| Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White | Michael Tisserand |
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| Lab Girl | Hope Jahren |
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| Olio | Tyehimba Jess |
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| Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life | Ruth Franklin |
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| The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between | Hisham Matar |
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| Between the World and Me | Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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| Eileen | Ottessa Moshfegh |
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| Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva | Rosemary Sullivan |
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| An Unnecessary Woman | Rabih Alameddine |
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| Rebel Yell | S. C. Gwynne |
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| Redeployment | Phil Klay |
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| The Sixth Extinction | Elizabeth Kolbert |
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| A Constellation of Vital Phenomena | Anthony Marra |
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| Forty-One False Starts | Janet Malcolm |
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| Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore | Linda Leavell |
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| Lawrence in Arabia | Scott Anderson |
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| The Faraway Nearby | Rebecca Solnit |
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| All We Know: Three Lives | Lisa Cohen |
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| Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Katherine Boo |
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| Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic | David Quammen |
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| The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo | Tom Reiss |
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| The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness | Kevin Young |
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| Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture | Daniel Mendelsohn |
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| Open City | Teju Cole |
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| The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood | James Gleick |
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| The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Siddhartha Mukherjee |
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| The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them | Elif Batuman |
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| The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Isabel Wilkerson |
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| Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard | Richard Brody |
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| The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century | Steve Coll |
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| The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals | Jane Mayer |
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| A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 | John Richardson |
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| Half of a Yellow Sun | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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