Lambda Literary Awards 2025: Complete list of winners
The 2025 Lambda Literary Awards have crowned an impressive array of LGBTQ+ voices, with this year’s winners spanning fiction, memoir, comics, and essays across multiple categories. The Lammy Awards, long considered the most prestigious honors for LGBTQ+ literature, celebrated works that capture the complexity and nuance of queer experience—from Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry in Gay Fiction to Brad Gooch’s ambitious RADIANT: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, a biography that traces the legendary artist’s cultural impact. The fiction categories were particularly robust this year, with multiple winners in both Transgender and Bisexual Literature showcasing the depth and breadth of contemporary queer storytelling.
What stands out about the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards is the diversity of form and perspective across the winners. The Transgender Fiction category alone honored three distinct voices—Nino Bulling’s Firebugs, KB Brookins’s Pretty, and Zefyr Lisowski’s Girl Work—each bringing singular visions to the category. Meanwhile, the Bisexual Literature category continued to gain prominence with three honorees, including Muriel Leung’s How To Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster and Desiree Akhavan’s You’re Embarrassing Yourself, signaling the ongoing expansion of bisexual narratives in literary recognition. Even the Comics category made its mark with Putty Pygmalion, demonstrating how LGBTQ+ stories continue to flourish across different mediums.
Beyond the individual victories, this year’s Lambda Literary Awards winners reflect a literary landscape where LGBTQ+ narratives have become essential to contemporary American letters. From Sandra Gail Lambert’s memoir My Withered Legs and Other Essays to Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, the full roster reveals an awards season that values both intimate personal testimony and imaginative fiction with equal measure. Below, you’ll find the complete list of 2025 winners and categories that showcase why the Lambda Literary Awards remain vital to LGBTQ+ literary culture.
Bisexual Literature
How To Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster by Muriel Leung- You’re Embarrassing Yourself by Desiree Akhavan
- Interrogation Records by Jeddie Sophronius
Gay Fiction
- Henry Henry by Allen Bratton
Gay Memoir/Biography
- RADIANT: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch
LGBTQ+ Comics
Lesbian Fiction
- The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Lesbian Memoir/Biography
- My Withered Legs and Other Essays by Sandra Gail Lambert
