Books that seamlessly bridged worlds were among the winners last evening at the National Book Critics Circle awards.

In biography, Julie Phillips won for “James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon” (St. Martin’s Press), about a science-fiction writer who had chosen her nom de plume from a jar of jam and who had also been an army officer, intelligence agent, journalist, painter, and wife. The audience roared when Ms. Phillips quoted her subject on the topic of awards: “Life is fair. Some people have talent and other people get prizes.”

Kiran Desai won the fiction award for “The Inheritance of Loss” (Atlantic Monthly Press), set in the Himalayas. In her remarks, the Booker award winner read “Boast of Quietness,” a poem that sums up the fragility of living between cultures: “My name is someone and anyone/I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.”

Lawrence Weschler won the criticism category for “Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences” (McSweeney’s), which juxtaposes seemingly different images that have unlikely similarities.

In winning for nonfiction, Simon Schama thanked librarians for assisting his research in writing “Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution” (Ecco), which chronicles slaves who left plantations and sided with the British.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million” (HarperCollins) won for memoir/autobiography. Troy Jollimore won the poetry award for “Tom Thomson in Purgatory” (Margie/Intuit House). He told the audience, “I’m stunned — and I might not be the only one.”

A professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Steven Kellman, garnered the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. The NBCC president, John Freeman, praised Mr. Kellman as a versatile reviewer who could slip Milton into a review of Cormac McCarthy without being pretentious. Mr. Kellman joked that unlike other forms of reviewing, literary criticism could be practiced legally in one’s underwear.

The Barnard College professor Mary Gordon introduced John Leonard, who won the Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement. She praised Mr. Leonard, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, for the “unparalleled support” he had given over the years to women writers.

Mr. Leonard told an about the time in 1947 that the critic Donald Ritchie and the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata stood atop a tower without a translator while managing to convey what they saw by referring to authors they knew in common.