March 7 (Bloomberg) -- Junot Diaz's ``The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'' (Riverhead Books) won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, while Edwidge Danticat's ``Brother, I'm Dying'' (Knopf) won for autobiography. Joyce Carol Oates, who was nominated in both categories, won no prizes.

It was a good night for the island of Hispaniola at the award ceremony in New York last night. Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the U.S. at age 6, while Danticat was born in Haiti and came to the U.S. at 12.

Diaz's award was accepted by his editor, Sean McDonald, who said that when Diaz was shortlisted for the award, he read ``every single book nominated tonight, and was awestruck.''

The other finalists in the fiction category were Vikram Chandra's ``Sacred Games'' (HarperCollins), Hisham Matar's ``In the Country of Men'' (Dial), Oates's ``The Gravedigger's Daughter'' (Ecco), and Marianne Wiggins's ``The Shadow Catcher'' (Simon & Schuster).

New Yorker magazine classical music critic Alex Ross won in the criticism category for ``The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century'' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He thanked the book critics for helping to propel his book from ``potential total oblivion to a glittering semi-obscurity.''

The winner in the general nonfiction category was Harriet Washington's ``Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present'' (Doubleday). A visibly moved Washington said she thought of her subjects less as black people than as faceless people.

``The attention of the critics has given them a face, has given them a voice,'' she said.

`Impossible Life'

Mary Jo Bang's ``Elegy'' (Graywolf), which chronicles a year of mourning following the death of her son, won in the poetry category. The winner in biography was ``Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer,'' by British author Tim Jeal (Yale University Press).

Emilie Buchwald, publisher of Minneapolis's Milkweed Editions, received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and Sam Anderson, book critic for New York magazine, was presented with the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

The National Book Critics Circle is an organization of approximately 800 book reviewers and editors. Founded in 1974, the group gave out its first awards the following year.

The nominees and winners are chosen by the group's 24-member board of directors, which includes staffers from Entertainment Weekly, Time magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Times and other newspapers, and a number of freelance critics and book bloggers.

The NBCC awards don't come with a monetary prize, but they are well-respected in the literary world.

(Laurie Muchnick is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Laurie Muchnick in New York at lmuchnick@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 7, 2008 00:00 EST