Edward P. Jones, who ended a 10-year absence from publishing with his novel ''The Known World'' (Amistad/HarperCollins), won the fiction prize of the National Book Critics Circle on Thursday night in a ceremony at New School University in Greenwich Village.

These other awards were made:

*Paul Hendrickson, ''Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy'' (Knopf), for general nonfiction.

*William Taubman, ''Khrushchev: The Man and His Era'' (W. W. Norton), for biography-autobiography.

*Rebecca Solnit, ''River of Shadows'' (Viking), a study of high-speed photography and other 19th-century technology, for criticism.

*Susan Stewart, ''Columbarium'' (University of Chicago Press), for poetry.

Studs Terkel, 91, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, oral historian and self-described champion of the uncelebrated, received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

''The Known World,'' the story of a black slaveholder and his plantation's collapse after his death, was a finalist for the National Book Awards last fall and is now in its eighth printing, with 100,000 copies in print.

Mr. Jones, 53, won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1993 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for his first book, ''Lost in the City,'' a collection of short stories about life in 1950's to 70's Washington, where he grew up.

A former proofreader for Tax Notes, a trade magazine, Mr. Jones took years to get going on ''The Known World.'' He acknowledges being a slow worker who does not like writing anything until he has the story constructed in his mind. ''There were days I decided I wasn't in the mood, so I just put it off,'' he said in an interview last fall.

In accepting the award Mr. Jones said he felt so embarrassed about the delay that when he finally finished, he could not bear to tell his agent, Eric Simonoff, on the phone. Instead he sent a letter to Mr. Simonoff, who left a complimentary message on Mr. Jones's answering machine. ''I still have that message,'' Mr. Jones said.

These were the other fiction nominees:

Monica Ali, ''Brick Lane.''

Caryl Phillips, ''A Distant Shore.''

Richard Powers, ''The Time of Our Singing.''

Tobias Wolff, ''Old School.''

Nonfiction finalists included William T. Vollman's seven-volume, 3,300-page ''Rising Up and Rising Down'' and Susan Sontag's ''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' a partial refutation of her influential ''On Photography,'' which won a book critics' award in 1978. The earlier book contended that repeated exposure to images of violence and suffering numb our emotions.

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a not-for-profit organization of about 750 book editors and critics. Its awards carry prestige but no cash prizes.
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