Living Canon

Lambda Literary Awards 2009: Complete list of winners

The 2009 Lambda Literary Awards celebrated another remarkable year of LGBTQ+ voices reshaping the literary landscape. Established in 1989, the Lambda Literary Awards have long served as the most prestigious recognition of LGBTQ+ literature, and this particular year’s honorees demonstrated the genre’s impressive range and depth. From intimate memoirs to expansive fictional narratives, the 2009 winners showcased how queer writers were tackling identity, desire, and belonging with unprecedented nuance and candor.

This year’s selections felt particularly significant for how they highlighted the breadth of LGBTQ+ experience across multiple identities and genres. Jenny Block’s unflinching Open captured the complexities of bisexual desire in contemporary culture, while Sheila Rowbotham’s biographical study of Edward Carpenter and Thea Hillman’s genre-bending Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) pushed at the boundaries of how identity could be explored on the page. The Lambda Awards winners in fiction—from Scott Heim’s haunting We Disappear to Chandra Mayor’s All the Pretty Girls—demonstrated that LGBTQ+ literature was increasingly claiming space in conversations about serious contemporary fiction rather than remaining siloed as niche category writing.

What emerges from examining the 2009 Lambda Literary Awards winners is a picture of a literary community coming into its own, where queer writers were trusted to tell increasingly ambitious and formally inventive stories. Below is the complete list of honorees across all categories for this pivotal year.

Bisexual Literature

  • Cover of Open Open by Jenny Block

Gay Fiction

Gay Memoir/Biography

Lesbian Fiction

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

Transgender Fiction