By Audrey McAvoy/AP
A novel by Nobel laureate Han Kang, Karen Hao’s examination of artificial intelligence and OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) and a memoir by the author Arundhati Roy were among the winners this week of the annual National Book Critics Circle awards.
Han’s “We Do Not Part,” translated by e.yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, addresses a 1948-1949 uprising on Jeju, an island south of the Korean mainland, in which thousands of people were killed.
Heather Scott Partington, who chaired the awards’ fiction committee, described the novel as “a work of blinding melancholy, bleak weather, and murmuring syntax” and said it “lingers like an atmospheric and arresting dream”.
The lifetime achievement award went to author and journalist Frances FitzGerald, whose 1972 “Fire in the Lake” was an early and prescient take on the Vietnam War.
NPR and PBS were presented with the achievement award, honouring institutions that have
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