Two Yaddo Authors Nominated for NBCC Awards

Alan Hollinghurst

Philip Roth Photo by Nancy Crampton

(January 31, 2005) - Two Yaddo authors – Alan Hollinghurst and Philip Roth – are nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards for the publishing year 2004. The winners will be announced at a March 18 ceremony in New York City.

Both writers are nominated in the fiction category for books that generated much public discussion, Mr. Hollinghurst for The Line of Beauty and Mr. Roth for The Plot Against America. The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize, is the story of an innocent young man (a Henry James scholar) who gets caught up in the confusing world of 1980s British politics when he moves into the attic room of a prominent family and finds himself able to pursue his private obsession with beauty, a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. The Plot Against America imagines Charles Lindbergh as a U.S. president who negotiates a cordial agreement with Hitler.

The National Book Critics Circle is a not-for-profit organization of active book editors and critics with nearly 700 members nationwide. The organization was founded in 1974 to encourage quality book criticism in all media and to create a way for critics to talk about their professional concerns.

National Book Critics Circle Awards are given in five categories: fiction, general nonfiction, biography/autobiography, poetry, and criticism. In addition to Mr. Hollinghurst and Mr. Roth, other nominees in the fiction category are Edwidge Danticat, for The Dew Breaker, David Mitchell, for Cloud Atlas, and Marilynne Robinson, for Gilead.