Left: Nora Krug. Photo taken by Nina Subin. Right: Belonging, cover art for Scribner, USA. Image courtesy of the author.
Congratulations are in order to SVA alumnus Nora Krug (MFA 2004 Illustration as Visual Essay), who recently took home this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award in the Autobiography category. About the “inherited sin” of the Holocaust, her book, Belonging, is deeply personal.
“If I learned one thing from making this book it’s that, as writers and artists, we need to continue to ask difficult questions, and unyieldingly advocate for a more humane society,” says Krug in response to winning the NBCC Autobiography Award.
Belonging is a graphic memoir that recaps the memories of Krug’s childhood in Karlsruhe, Germany decades after the fall of the Nazi regime and the Second World War. Not knowing much about her family history as a youth, Krug returns to Germany to find out the truth about her ancestors' involvement in the totalitarian government. In the book she visits archives, conducts research and interviews family members to find out the stories of her maternal grandfather and paternal uncle. As her journey progresses, the book begins to resemble a scrapbook, filled with letters, photographs, and pieces from her uncle’s childhood journal. “That’s where honor seems to lie, this book suggests: in the restless work of remembering, in the looking again, the recalibration and the revision. In getting the whole picture, and getting it right,” summarized Parul Sehgal in the New York Times.
Read more about the other winners from the five additional categories of the National Book Critics Circle Award at New York Magazine's cultural website, Vulture.