Author Ben Fountain was announced the winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for his first novel.

Ben Fountain's debut novel "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" won the author this year's National Book Critics Circle award. The novel is a story about a young soldier's visit home during the Iraq war.

The novel beat Zadie Smith's "NW" and Laurent Binet's acclaimed French translation, "HHhH" to win the NBCC prize. This is the only award in the U.S. that is chosen by the critics themselves - with judges describing it as "a wise, sharply insightful examination of war, class, and celebrity in America."

"During the second world war, the US army commissioned Frank Capra to create a documentary series explaining Why We Fight. A virtuoso account of the noxious nexus of football, business, and combat, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk makes magnificent mischief explaining why we should not," said NBCC board member Steven Kellman.

In the non-fiction category, Andrew Solomon took home the award for his book "Far From the Tree", a study of being a parent to different kinds of children. According to the judges, the book was "a sweeping yet in-depth synthesising of key social issues from deafness to homosexuality to create what feels like a whole new area of study."

Robert Caro's "magisterial", the fourth volume in his ongoing biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson "The Passage of Power", took the biography prize, while DA Powell's "Useless Landscape" won the poetry award. The collection is "at once erotic and wickedly witty, spiritual and profound", and "captures growing up and also growing up gay", said judges.