This year’s winners of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced Thursday; Junot Diaz won the fiction award for his debut novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” while Harriet Washington’s “Medical Apartheid” won for non-fiction.

Junot Diaz’s tragicomic tale of an overweight and nerdy Dominican man searching for love in “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Riverhead Books) received the National Bok Critics Circle award for fiction, Bloomberg.com reports.

The 2007 winners were announced Thursday, March 6, in New York City.

The award for non-fiction went to Harriet Washington, whose book “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,” (Doubleday) chronicles medical experimentation on black Americans.

“Brother, I’m Dying” (Alfred A. Knopf) by Edwidge Danticat won the autobiography category, while “Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer” (Yale University Press) by Tim Jeal received the biography award.

Mary Jo Bang was recipient of the poetry award for “Elegy” (Graywolf Press) and “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Alex Ross won the criticism award.

The winners were voted by the 24-member board of the National Book Critics Circle, a non-profit organization made up of book critics. It was founded in 1974 and now consists of several hundred active book reviewers. All books nominated in the five categories were published in the past year in the United States.

Along with the book awards, two honorary ones were also presented. The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, awarded annually to the most accomplished reviewer from within the membership, went to literary critic Sam Anderson of New York magazine.

Emilie Buchwald, co-founder of the Milkweed Editions publishing house, won the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, which recognizes exceptional contributions to books.

http://www.bookcritics.org/