Announcing the Finalists for the 2025 Big Other Book Award for Translation!

We’re excited to announce the finalists for the 2025 Big Other Book Award for Translation. The winner will be announced at the 2025 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 2025 Big Other Book Award for Translation:

António Lobo Antunes’s Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach, translated by Elizabeth Lowe (Dalkey Archive Press)

Gilles Deleuze’s On Painting: Courses, March-June 1981, translated by Charles J. Stivale (University of Minnesota Press)

Sibylle Grimbert’s The Last of Its Kind, translated by Aleshia Jensen (Book*hug Press)

Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, translated by Sophie Hughes (The New York Review of Books)

Pascalle Monnier’s Touché, translated by Cole Swensen (Green Linden Press)

Melissa Sauma‘s Luminescence (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing), translated by Ariel Francisco

Yoko Tawada’s Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)

Olga Tokarczuk’s Mr. Distinctive, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, illustrated by Joanna Concejo (Seven Stories Press)

Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III (Duke University Press), translated by Joel Scott

Can Xue’s Mother River, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Open Letter Books)

(Image: Roberto Matta’s Untitled (c. 1996))

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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