We are delighted to announce Big Other‘s 2023 Lifetime Achievement Awardees!

The award honors exemplary living writers, who have made a significant contribution to literature and are continuing to shape and direct the conversation about literary art, about language, form, structure, style, and more.

Championing authors at the height of their careers is part of the Big Other’s longstanding efforts to celebrate literary art; promote innovation, creativity, diversity, and inclusivity; and engage and inspire more discerning readers.

These writers will be honored at the 2023 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony (date to be announced).

Here are our Honorees for 2023:

Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout is the author of many books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Her most recent books include Go Figure, Finalists, Conjure, Versed (winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), Money Shot, Just Saying, Itself, Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015, and Wobble (a National Book Awards finalist). Armantrout is now retired from her long tenure teaching at the University of California, San Diego, where she was Professor of Poetry and Poetics. Armantrout resides in the Seattle area

Rikki Ducornet

Rikki Ducornet is the author of many books, including most recently Netsuke, Brightfellow, Trafik, and The Plotinus. Her work has been described as “linguistically explosive and socially relevant,” and praised for “deploy[ing] tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit.” She has received many awards, including the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

Gordon Lish

Gordon Lish is an acclaimed author and editor. A former editor at Esquire and Alfred A. Knopf, he is celebrated for his notable work with authors, including Raymond Carver, Denis Donoghue, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Garielle Lutz, Ben Marcus, and Christine Schutt, among many others. His books include Dear Mr. Capote, What I Know So Far, Mourner at the Door, Extravaganza, White Plains, Peru, Zimzum, The Selected Stories of Gordon Lish, and more. He lives in New York.

Nathaniel Mackey

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Blue Fasa, Nod House, the National Book Award-winning Splay Anthem, Whatsaid Serif, and Eroding Witness, which was chosen for the National Poetry Series. His many honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize; and the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society; the 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation; and the 2015 Bollingen Prize from Yale University. From 2001 to 2007, he served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Mackey taught for many years at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University.