Deep Vellum Nominated In Two Categories For National Book Awards Longlist
For Immediate Release— Ethan Rutherford’s North Sun and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s TERROR COUNTER have been longlisted for the 76th National Book Awards.
Friday, September 12, the 2025 National Book Awards Longlist nominations were announced through The New Yorker in all categories. Among the contenders, two Deep Vellum titles were selected in the Fiction and Poetry longlists: North Sun (Longlist for Fiction), by Ethan Rutherford, and TERROR COUNTER (Longlist for Poetry), by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi.
Ethan Rutherford’s debut novel North Sun was released in March of this year through Deep Vellum’s imprint A Strange Object, directed by Austin-based editor, Jill Meyers. The novel was quickly met with resounding praise, including a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Rutherford’s previous works include The Peripatetic Coffin: And Other Stories (Ecco, 2013), Winner of the Minnesota Book Award and Finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and Farthest South & Other Stories (Deep Vellum / A Strange Object, 2021), also edited by Jill Meyers.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s TERROR COUNTER is also a debut collection which was released in June of this year through Deep Vellum, edited by Dallas-based author and editor Sebastián Páramo. TERROR COUNTER is “An evocative, boundary-pushing reaction to the languages of terror that systematically undermine the lives of Palestinians,” (Vulture) and was among Autostraddle’s “Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for June 2025.” Fady Joudah, one of the 2024 National Book Award Finalists for poetry for his collection [...], wrote of TERROR COUNTER: “Anyone who understands poetry as a search for liberation, whatever the level of that liberation, will hold TERROR COUNTER as compass. Filled with fierce lyric tenderness and clear-eyed commitment to revolutionary aesthetic, TERROR COUNTER is devoted to the redemption of the self from a world ready to usurp this resistance. Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian poetic being of the most natural order.” Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s sophomore poetry collection, ANTIGONE. VELOCITY. SALT., is slated to be released by Deep Vellum in late 2027.
This is the first year Deep Vellum has been considered for the English-language Fiction and Poetry categories. This is a monumental honor for Deep Vellum as we continue to draw attention to excellent writing, authors, and editors. We could not be more proud of our authors and our Texas-based editors who worked on these titles, highlighting our mission in bringing Texas into the larger, global literary conversation.
Winners of each category will be announced on November 19, 2025, at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony in New York.
Both titles are available to order from Deep Vellum, Bookshop.org, or your local independent bookstore.
Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two story collections—Farthest South (Deep Vellum, 2020) and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco, 2013)—and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. His first novel, North Sun: The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, was published by Deep Vellum / A Strange Object in 2025 and has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the National Book Award. Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife and two children.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist.
Established in 1950, the National Book Awards are American literary prizes administered by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization. A pantheon of writers such as William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Robert Lowell, Walker Percy, John Updike, Katherine Anne Porter, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Adrienne Rich, Thomas Pynchon, Alice Walker, E. Annie Proulx, Jesmyn Ward, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have all won National Book Awards. Although other categories have been recognized in the past, the Awards currently honor the best Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature, published each year.
Deep Vellum is a nonprofit publishing house and literary arts organization with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature. Founded in 2013 in Dallas, TX, Deep Vellum has expanded to encompass six distinct publishing imprints and is now the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States.