Current or recently released autobiography

Thanks for joining us. We love featuring the National Book Critics Circle shortlists; they always surface excellent books we might otherwise have missed.

Current or recently released autobiography

What were you looking for when you were drawing up the 2024 NBCC shortlist of the best recent memoirs?

All the books that made the shortlist were works that the committee members felt fundamentally changed how we viewed the world, whether an aspect of history or how to view the present.

We didn’t set out the year looking for these kinds of books per se, but this was an aspect that we noticed in our discussions and these five titles kept coming up. They are aesthetically all quite different but they are all unforgettable.

Current or recently released autobiography books

Did you notice any trends among this year’s submissions?

This was a phenomenal year for autobiography. We were thrilled by all the diversity of subject matter, authors, aesthetics, forms. We saw a lot of books that crossed genres in some way, that wer