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.

[1] 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.

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.

[1] 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.

[5] In 1981 Nona Balakian won Rockefeller Grant for her work on William Saroyan.