Balakian, Nona

Nona Balakian (Armenian: Նոնա Պալագեան; September 4, 1918, in Constantinople – August 12, 1991, in New York City) was a literary critic and an editor at the New York Times Sunday Book Review. She served on the Pulitzer Prize committee and was a board member of the Authors Guild and the Pen Club as well as a founder of the National Book Critics Circle, whose Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing is named for her. Balakian immigrated to New York as a child. She graduated from Barnard College and received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she studied with the literary critic Lionel Trilling, in 1943. She joined the New York Times Book Review that same year and remained a staff member for 43 years, retiring in 1987. She and her sister, Anna Balakian, a literary critic and professor at New York University who died in 1997, were members of a literary circle that also included the playwright William Saroyan and the diarist Anaïs Nin. In 1981 Nona Balakian won a Rockefeller grant for her work on William Saroyan. The Balakian sisters were the grandnieces of the archbishop and Armenian genocide survivor Grigoris Balakian and the aunts of the poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Balakian.