We are delighted to announce Big Other‘s 2024 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 2024 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony (date to be announced).

Here are our Honorees for 2024:

Annie Dillard

Best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and nonfiction, the latter with an emphasis on meditations on the natural world, Annie Dillard is the author of many books, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Living by Fiction, The Writing Life, The Maytrees, and The Abundance. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

László Krasznahorkai

Best known for “difficult,” “demanding” dystopian novels, László Krasznahorkai is the author of many books, including War & War, Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, Seiobo There Below, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (which won the 2019 Big Other Book Award for Tranlsation), and Herscht 07769 (which is a finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Translation. Several of his works, including his novels Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, have been adapted into feature films by Béla Tarr.

Salman Rushdie

Best known for work that often combines fabulism with historical fiction, which primarily explores connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, Salman Rushdie, is the author of many books, including The Satanic Verses, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, The Enchantress of Florence, Quichotte, Victory City, and Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be “the best novel of all winners” on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.

Yōko Tawada

Best known for boundary-crossing writing that foregrounds language’s artificiality and magicality, Yōko Tawada is the author of many books, including Where Europe Begins, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Facing the Bridge, The Naked Eye, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Scattered All Over the Earth, Three Streets, and Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel.

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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