Alan Hollinghurst, Yael van der Wouden, and Casey McQuiston are among the authors contending for the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards, given annually to outstanding LGBTQ+ books.
Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings was nominated in the gay fiction category, alongside Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang; Henry Henry by Allen Bratton; In Tongues by Thomas Grattan; and Napalm in the Heart, written by Pol Guasch and translated by Mara Faye Lethem.
Van der Wouden’s The Safekeep made the lesbian fiction shortlist, as did Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California; Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates; Melissa Mogollon’s Oye; and Maggie Thrash’s Rainbow Black.
McQuiston made the bisexual fiction shortlist for The Pairing, along with August Thompson for Anyone’s Ghost, Rebecca K Reilly for Greta & Valdin, Muriel Leung for How To Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, and Kimberly King Parsons for We Were the Universe.
The finalists in the transgender nonfiction category are Nico Lang for American Teenager, Vera Blossom for How To Fuck Like a Girl, CeCé Telfer for Make It Count, KB Brookins for Pretty, and Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift for Trans Femme Futures.
Making the LGBTQ+ young adult shortlist were K. Ancrum for Icarus, Logan-Ashley Kisner for Old Wounds, Kamilah Cole for So Let Them Burn, H. A. Clarke for The Feast Makers, and Chatham Greenfield for Time and Time Again.
The Lambda Literary Awards, called the Lammys, were established in 1989. Previous winners include Emma Grove for The Third Person, Carmen Maria Machado for Her Body and Other Parties, and Saeed Jones for How We Fight for Our Lives.
The winners of this year’s prizes will be announced at a virtual ceremony on October 4. A full list of finalists is available at the Lambda Literary website.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
