Announcing the Finalists for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction!

We’re excited to announce the finalists for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction. The winner will be announced at the 2023 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony, which will be aired virtually (date and time to be announced).

Without further ado, here are the finalists for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction:

Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones’s The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History (Rose Metal Press)

Acid Horizon’s Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape (Repeater)

Laynie Browne’s Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar Press)

Julie Carr’s Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (University of Nebraska Press)

Nona Fernández’s Voyager: Constellations of Memory (Graywolf Press), translated by Natasha Wimmer

Byung-Chul Han’s Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East and Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (Polity Press), both translated by Daniel Steuer

Christine Hume’s Everything I Never Wanted to Know (Mad Creek Books)

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial (Grove Press)

Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like a Woman (Grove Press)

Jean-Manuel Roubineau’s The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic (Oxford University Press), translated by Malcolm DeBevoise, and edited by Phillip Mitsis

Kristin Ross’s The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life (Verso Books)

David Rothenberg’s Whale Music (Terra Nova Press)

Ron Sakolsky’s Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination (Eberhardt Press)

Susan M. Schultz’s Meditations: December 2019-December 2020 (Wet Cement Press)

Tony Trigilio’s Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press)

Steve Tromans’s Rhythmicity and Deleuze: Practice as Research in the Musical-Philosophical (Lexington Books)

Julie Marie Wade’s Otherwise (Autumn House Press)

McKenzie Wark’s Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso Press)

Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations on Land and Freedom (Pluto), edited by Francis Dupuis-Déri and Benjamin Pillet

(Image: Gerhard Richter’s March 13, 2000 (Firenze))

John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024) and Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026). His fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

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