Talk:National Book Critics Circle Award

Sandrof & Balakian awards & the NBCC page

It seems that just because no winner is listed at the NBCC site, it is not necessarily the case that no award was given. For example, this page on the NBCC site says that Pauline Kael was given a Sandrof in 2000, but there's no mention of her on the winners' page. So I've removed the "No award given" lines, and I'm looking for a more complete source. ShelfSkewed [Talk] 04:54, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi again! I thought that may be the case when I added those notes, but for lack of better sources, I thought to leave it as it was; the official website is obviously still in the process of being updated as far as past winners go. Thanks for helping out! María: (habla ~ cosas) 12:28, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

A note of interest: Nona Balakian died in 1991, suggesting that the award was inaugurated in 1992 (for work during the previous year), which is why there are no winners to be found earlier than that. ShelfSkewed [Talk] 22:44, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Confirmed: I found two references to George Scialabba as the first winner of the Balakian award. --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 03:15, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Evidently there has been one Sandrof awarded annually from 2001 to 2011 (dated 2000 to 2010). Is it now official policy to award one annually?

National Book Critics Circle now says, "recognizes no more than one person or organization for 'exceptional contributions to books' with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award". The bold was my inference from a list, maybe wrong. --P64 (talk) 22:19, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Article length

This article is getting long and unsustainable. What do you think about creating 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award and so on for each year.. at least for the number of years we have existing finalists information: 2007-2011 (5 yrs). It can mirror the setup used by Costa Book Award such as 2011 Costa Book Awards. See the template Template:Costa awards intro, the article header only has to be written one time. Green Cardamom (talk) 00:56, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

My revamp of the article a few hours ago did not touch section Finalists, iirc, except to move it down ("relegate" in the summary) and insert the hatnote "All dates are publication years, currently January 1 to December 31."

I support export of the lists of finalists at least to List of National Book Critics Circle finalists (lowercase finalists), or the same title with Awards. Regarding the more elaborate scheme, I abstain.

The article should retain complete lists of Winners. That will be short enough. --P64 (talk) 01:20, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

I think an award with this many prize categories, plus it's among the top 3 or 4 most important American literary awards, would be justified to have a unique article for each year. The problem with a list-of article is it too would quickly become too long, indeed would be too long already if it was fully expanded for every year. Green Cardamom (talk) 03:53, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

Late to the conversation comment-- The problems with article length, organization and ease-of-use could be fixed by rewriting the lists as tables with the article sections separated by prize category, and the columns of the table being year/winning book and author/finalist books and authors.--ColonelHenry (talk) 18:17, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Split awards

A while ago I marked "the first split in NBCC Award history" (2008) with a Note. Is it still the only split? Yes it is, if i skim correctly the recent lists, and that Note is reliable.

... So I have revised the Note accordingly. --P64 (talk) 14:59, 9 March 2012 (UTC)