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Nobel Prize-winning neuropsychiatrist Eric R. Kandel, author of “In Search of Memory,”  “The Age of Insight” and other notable titles, has been given this year’s Jewish Book Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Winners of 2012 Jewish Book Council awards were announced on Jan. 15. Kandel’s early memories as a Jewish boy living in Austria at the onset of World War II served as the catalyst for “In Search of Memory,” his award-winning exploration of the life of the mind.

The Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award went to “City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York,” edited by Deborah Dash Moore. The three-volume work includes contributions from Howard B. Rock, Annie Polland, Daniel Soyer and Jeffrey S. Gurock.

Novelist Francesca Segal received the National Jewish Book Award in fiction for “The Innocents”. The novel, modeled on Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” examines the behaviors and beliefs of an Orthodox Jewish community in London.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz was given the nonfiction award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience for Koren Talmud Bavli, a groundbreaking new edition of the Talmud.

Kandel will be the keynote speaker at the awards ceremony on March 14 at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. A complete list of winners and finalists is available at www.jewishbookcouncil.org.