Recognizing excellence in literature published in 2025 and supporting the vital work of innovative writers and adventurous presses, we announced the winners of the 2025 Big Other Book Awards tonight in each of the following categories: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and translation. A Readers’ Choice Award and awards for lifetime achievement and outstanding service to the literary community were also presented. We also paid homage to two champions of literature and small presses, including Big Other, each of whom died last year, namely, John Domini and Dan Wickett.
All the books below are linked to their respective pages at Bookshop. Visit the Big Other Shop there!
Without further ado, here are the winners of the 2025 Big Other Book Awards:
Fiction:
Norman Lock’s Eden’s Clock (Bellevue Literary Press)
Judge’s citation: In Eden’s Clock, Norman Lock crafts an enthralling American odyssey that is at once picaresque adventure, historical meditation, and tribute to the storytelling traditions of an earlier age. Through the voice of Frederick Heigold—a mute Civil War veteran and clockmaker recounting his improbable journey to Jack London—Lock explores the fragile boundaries between individual will and the vast forces of history, chance, and catastrophe. Richly imagined and deeply humane, Eden’s Clock is a fitting culmination to Lock’s The American Novels series, a remarkable literary project.
Nonfiction:
Jeffrey Pethybridge’s Force Drift: An Essay in the Epic (Tupelo Press)
Judge’s citation: In Force Drift: An Essay in the Epic, Jeffrey Pethybridge confronts the violence of the U.S. torture program with extraordinary formal intelligence and ethical rigor. Drawing on documentary poetics, political theory, and the epic tradition, this text seeks not merely to represent atrocity but to register the forces that sustain it, exposing the language, architectures, and abstractions through which state violence is concealed. At once intellectually demanding and morally urgent, Force Drift is a powerful act of reckoning and a remarkable work of documentary imagination.
Poetry:
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s Terror Counter (Deep Vellum Publishing)
Judge’s citation: In Terror Counter, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi tunnels through the language of empire, law, and literary convention, creating a poetics of fugitivity, opacity, and collective survival. Formally inventive and politically uncompromising, the collection refuses the terms through which Palestinian life is made legible and consumable, excavating instead new possibilities for relation, rebellion, and futurity. These are poems that weaken foundations and make a way out of no way.
Translation:
Can Xue’s Mother River (Open Letter Books), translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
Judge’s citation: In Mother River, Can Xue builds a series of uncanny fictions in which perception itself becomes unstable. A man pursues an elusive golden peacock that continually slips beyond capture, while elsewhere a woman communicates with shifting indeterminate forms of light that seem to answer her without ever fully resolving into meaning. Even a river running through a small village feels sentient, altering the boundaries between landscape and consciousness. Across quietly disorienting thirteen stories, Xue renders reality porous. Objects think, environments remember, and human intention dissolves into atmosphere. Strange, precise, and disquieting, Mother River extends Can Xue’s signature exploration of how meaning is made and unmade at the edge of the known.
Readers’ Choice Award:
Elaine Equi’s Out of the Blank (Coffee House Press)
Judge’s citation: Out of the Blank is a masterclass in poetic attention. With her characteristic blend of humor, curiosity, and philosophical lightness, Elaine Equi discovers unexpected portals in the commonplace, turning the smallest observations into occasions for surprise and reflection. These nimble, luminous poems expand the boundaries of the everyday without ever losing sight of its peculiar magic.
Congratulations, again, to all the winners of the 2025 Big Other Book Awards: Elaine Equi, Norman Lock, Jeffrey Pethybridge, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Can Xue and Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping!
Congratulations, again, to the awardees of the 2025 Big Other Lifetime Achievement Award: Susan Howe, Jacques Rancière, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Jay L. Wright!
And congratulations again to the awardees of the 2025 Big Other Literary Citizenship Award: Joseph Schreiber and Micah Zevin!
View the 2025 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony HERE!