Lambda Literary Awards 2018: Complete list of winners

The 2018 Lambda Literary Awards showcased the remarkable breadth of queer literature across multiple genres and experiences. These prestigious honors, which have been recognizing LGBTQ+ writers since 1989, cast a wide net this year, honoring everything from experimental poetry to curated anthologies. Among the standout winners were Carmen Maria Machado’s stunning collection Her Body and Other Parties, which took the Lesbian Fiction prize, and Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s haunting memoir The Fact of a Body, recognized in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography category. The awards also demonstrated the growing prominence of transgender voices in publishing, with multiple wins including Bogi Takács’s edited anthology Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction and C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity.

What’s particularly striking about this year’s Lambda Literary Awards winners is how they bridge personal narrative with larger cultural and historical conversations. Roxane Gay’s Hunger and Barbara Browning’s The Gift both claimed honors in Bisexual Literature, while John Rechy’s career-spanning work After the Blue Hour earned recognition in Gay Fiction alongside memoirs like Chiké Frankie Edozien’s Lives of Great Men. The inclusion of visual storytelling through the LGBTQ+ Comics category—won by My Favorite Thing is Monsters—further underscores how the Lambdas recognize that queer stories take many forms. Whether you’re exploring the Lambda Literary Awards for the first time or tracking winners across multiple years, this year’s selections offer an impressive snapshot of contemporary LGBTQ+ literature at its most vital and varied.

Below you’ll find the complete list of 2018 Lambda Literary Awards winners across all categories: