Lambda Literary Awards 2010s: A decade of winners

The 2010s marked a transformative period for LGBTQ+ literature, and the Lambda Literary Awards captured this evolution beautifully. As the nation’s oldest and most prominent international book awards for LGBTQ+ writers, the Lambdas reflected a community increasingly confident in telling its own stories—from intimate memoirs to sweeping fiction that claimed space in the literary mainstream. This was the decade when writers like Colm Tóibín (who won for The Empty Family in 2012) and Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties, 2018) demonstrated that queer narratives could be aesthetically ambitious and commercially significant simultaneously. Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? arrived in 2013 to reclaim her own legend, while Cleve Jones’s When We Rise (2017) chronicled the movement that shaped a generation.

What emerges from this decade of Lambda Literary Award winners is a portrait of LGBTQ+ publishing that refused simple categorization. The awards expanded to recognize transgender voices and nonbinary perspectives with growing prominence, while bisexual literature—long marginalized even within queer spaces—found increasing visibility. Writers worked across genres: Rabih Alameddine’s lyrical experimental fiction, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s forensic memoir, Casey Plett’s quieter transgender narratives all claimed recognition. The 2010s were also when the Lambda Awards began honoring LGBTQ+ comics as a distinct category, acknowledging that graphic storytelling had become essential to contemporary queer expression.

Below, discover how each year’s winners shaped this remarkable decade:

2010

Bisexual Literature

• Holy Communion by Mykola Dementiuk
• Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents by Minal Hajratwala

Gay Fiction

• Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre

Gay Memoir/Biography

• Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back by Reynolds Price

Lesbian Fiction

• A Field Guide to Deception by Jill Malone

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

Transgender Fiction

• Lynnee Breedlove’s One Freak Show by Lynn Breedlove

2011

Bisexual Literature

• The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes
• Border Sexualities, Border Families in Schools by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli

Gay Fiction

• Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett

Gay Memoir/Biography

• Secret Historian by Justin Spring

Lesbian Fiction

• Inferno (a poet’s novel) by Eileen Myles

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• Hammer!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life by Barbara Hammer

Transgender Fiction

• Holding Still for As Long As Possible by Zoe Whittall
• Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community by Noach Dzmura(editor)

2012

Bisexual Literature

• The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning
• The Horizontal Poet by Jan Steckel

Gay Fiction

• The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín

Gay Memoir/Biography

• The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood by Glen Retief

Lesbian Fiction

• Six Metres of Pavement by Farzana Doctor

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love & Revolution by Jeanne Córdova

Transgender Fiction

• Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica by Tristan Taormino(editor)
• Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels by Justin Vivian Bond

2013

Bisexual Literature

• My Awesome Place: The Autobiography of Cheryl B by Cheryl Burke

Gay Fiction

• Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Gay Memoir/Biography

• Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz by Cynthia Carr

Lesbian Fiction

• The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Transgender Fiction

• The Collection: Short Fiction From The Transgender Vanguard by Tom Légerand Riley MacLeod (editors)
• Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies by Anne Enke(editor)

2014

Bisexual Literature

• My Education by Susan Choi
• The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television by Maria San Filippo

Gay Fiction

• Mundo Cruel by Luis NegrónwithSuzanne Jill Levine(trans.)

Gay Memoir/Biography

• A Heaven of Words by Jerry Rosco(editor)

LGBTQ+ Comics

• Calling Dr. Laura: A Graphic Memoir

Lesbian Fiction

• Happiness, Like Water by Chinelo Okparanta

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• Body Geographic by Barrie Jean Borich

Transgender Fiction

• Wanting in Arabic by Trish Salah
• The End of San Francisco by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

2015

Bisexual Literature

• Give It to Me by Ana Castillo
• Fire Shut Up In My Bones by Charles M. Blow

Gay Fiction

• I Loved You More by Tom Spanbauer

Gay Memoir/Biography

• Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

LGBTQ+ Comics

• Second Avenue Caper

Lesbian Fiction

• Yabo by Alexis De Veaux

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith by Alethia JonesandVirginia Eubanks, withBarbara Smith

Transgender Fiction

• A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett
• Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man by Thomas Page McBee

2016

Bisexual Literature

• Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham by Emily Bingham

Gay Fiction

• God in Pink by Hasan Namir

Gay Memoir/Biography

• James Merrill: Life and Art by Langdon Hammer

LGBTQ+ Comics

• The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ & Amal

Lesbian Fiction

• Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear by Kate Carroll de Gutes

Transgender Fiction

• Tiny Pieces of Skull, or a Lesson in Manners by Roz Kaveney
• Born on the Edge of Race and Gender: A Voice for Cultural Competency by Willy Wilkinson
• succubus in my pocket by kari edwards

2017

Bisexual Literature

• Mouth to Mouth by Abigail Child
• Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me by Ana Castillo

Gay Fiction

• The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

Gay Memoir/Biography

• When We Rise by Cleve Jones

LGBTQ+ Comics

• Wuvable Oaf: Blood & Metal

Lesbian Fiction

• Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• ody, Undone: Living On After Great Pain by Gloria Joseph

Transgender Fiction

• Small Beauty by jia qing wilson-yang
• Life Beyond My Body: A Transgender Journey to Manhood in China by Lei Ming
• Reacquainted with Life by Kokumo

2018

Bisexual Literature

• The Gift by Barbara Browning
• Hunger by Roxane Gay

Gay Fiction

• After the Blue Hour by John Rechy

Gay Memoir/Biography

• Lives of Great Men by Chike Frankie Edozien

LGBTQ+ Comics

• My Favorite Thing is Monsters

Lesbian Fiction

• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

Transgender Fiction

• Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction by Bogi Takács(editor)
• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton
• recombinant by Ching-In Chen

2019

Bisexual Literature

• Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, withTina Kover(trans.)
• Out of Step: A Memoir by Anthony Moll
• We Play a Game by Duy Doan

Gay Fiction

• Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

Gay Memoir/Biography

• No Ashes in the Fire by Darnell L. Moore

LGBTQ+ Comics

• The Lie and How We Told It

Lesbian Fiction

• The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• Chronology by Zahra Patterson

Transgender Fiction

• Little Fish by Casey Plett
• Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson
• lo terciario / the tertiary by Roque Salas Rivera