We are delighted to announce Big Other‘s 2025 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 2025 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony (date to be announced).

Here are our Honorees for 2025:

Susan Howe

Susan Howe is an American poet, essayist, and critic associated with experimental and avant-garde writing. Educated at the Boston Museum School, she initially trained as a visual artist before turning to poetry, bringing a distinctive attention to typography, archival materials, and the visual field of the page.

Howe’s work engages early American history, Puritan texts, and marginalized archival voices, combining poetic fragmentation with scholarly inquiry. Major works include My Emily Dickinson, The Birth-mark, and The Midnight, which blend poetry, criticism, and historical reflection. She has often been linked to Language poetry, though her work remains formally distinct within that context.

Her more recent books include Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, Debths, and Penitential Cries, which continues her exploration of voice, history, and the materiality of language through archival and sonic experimentation. Howe has received numerous honors, including the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, and is widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of her generation, known for reshaping the relationship between poetry, history, and the archive.

Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher whose work spans political theory, aesthetics, and the philosophy of education. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was a student of Louis Althusser and contributed to the collective volume Reading Capital. Rancière later broke with Althusser’s structural Marxism, developing his own approach centered on equality, dissensus, and the capacity of ordinary people to think and act politically.

He is best known for works such as The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which challenges conventional ideas about teaching and intellectual authority, and Disagreement, where he defines politics as moments when those excluded from power assert their equality. His writings on art and perception, including The Politics of Aesthetics, explore how aesthetic experience shapes what can be seen, said, and thought within a society.

Among his more recent books are Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, The Method of Equality, and The Time of the Landscape, which continues his exploration of aesthetics, perception, and temporality. Rancière’s work has been influential across disciplines for its insistence on radical equality and its rethinking of the relationship between politics, art, and knowledge.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and public intellectual best known for her work in postcolonial studies and critical theory. Educated at the University of Calcutta and Cornell University, she has spent much of her career teaching at Columbia University, where she is University Professor in the Humanities.

Spivak rose to international prominence with her influential 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” which examines how marginalized voices are represented—and often silenced—within dominant Western discourse. She is also widely known for translating and introducing Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology into English, helping shape the reception of deconstruction in the Anglophone world.

Her more recent books include Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching, which reflects on literature, pedagogy, and responsibility across global contexts, and Spivak Moving, a volume of interviews and reflections on her intellectual trajectory. Throughout her career, Spivak has combined theoretical work with activism, particularly in rural education initiatives in India, emphasizing the importance of ethical engagement and the persistent challenges of representing subaltern subjects.

Jay L. Wright

Jay L. Wright is an American poet, essayist, and playwright whose work explores myth, spirituality, and cross-cultural traditions, particularly drawing on African, Indigenous American, and European sources. He studied at University of New Mexico and later at University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at a number of institutions while maintaining a relatively independent literary career.

Wright’s poetry is known for its philosophical depth, musicality, and engagement with ritual and cosmology. Major works include The Homecoming Singer and Dimensions of History, which helped establish his reputation as a major American poet. His writing often resists conventional narrative, instead constructing layered meditations on identity, history, and the sacred.

His more recent books include Transfigurations: Collected Poems, a comprehensive gathering of his poetic work, and Music’s Mask and Measure, which reflects his ongoing interest in music, performance, and poetic form. Wright has received numerous honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive and intellectually ambitious poets of his generation.