The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

"The National Book Critics Circle Awards are organised by some of America’s most respected arbiters of taste. In 2022, the NBCC fiction prize was won by the noted poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers for her first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , a book that has won near-universal acclaim since its release in May. As Joshunda Sanders explained in The Boston Globe, it’s “a sweeping matriarchal epic that leads readers through a majestic tour of race, family, and love in America… the Great American Novel at its finest.” In Canada, Sheila Heti won the Governor General’s Literary Award for her wildly imaginative Pure Colour , in which she contrasts the wonder and joy of creation with our daily experience of frustration and disappointment. She’s one of my favourite writers—erudite, funny, intelligent, unpretentious. This latest work is unmissable. Jennifer Down won Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award for Bodies of Light, which was praised for its “ethical precision” in its portrait of a young girl in care who is forced to reinvent herself again and again. Nicolas Rothwell has also just been announced the winner of the Australian Prime Minister’s award for his novel Red Heaven , set in 1960s eastern Europe. At the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Whiti Hereaka won the 2022 fiction prize for Kurangaituku , a subversion of the traditional Māori story of Hatupatu—as seen through the eyes of the monster."