The 36th annual Lambda Literary Awards, celebrating excellence in LGBTQ literature, were presented in 26 categories at a ceremony held in New York City this week. See those winners and the winners of seven special awards here.
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Winners of the 34th annual Reading the West Book Awards, sponsored by the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association and chosen by booksellers and readers, have been announced. The virtual event Tuesday night featuring acceptance remarks from each winning author can be seen here. The winners:
Fiction: Holler, Child by LaToya Watkins (Tiny Reparations Books)
Debut fiction: Go as a River by Shelley Read (Spiegel & Grau)
Poetry: West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal (Copper Canyon Press)
General nonfiction: True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America by Betsy Gaines Quammen (Torrey House Press)
Memoir/biography: Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa Sevigny (W. W. Norton)
Picture book: Alithia Ramirez Was an Artist by Violet Lemay, with art by Alithia Ramirez (Michael Sampson Books)
Young reader/middle grade: Coyote Queen by Jessica Vitalis (Greenwillow Books)
YA/teen: Rez Ball by Byron Graves (Heartdrum)
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American author V. V. Ganeshananthan won the Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel Brotherless Night (published in the U.S. by Random House) and Canadian writer Naomi Klein took the inaugural Women's Prize for Nonfiction for Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Ganeshananthan receives £30,000 (about $38,300), along with a limited-edition bronze statuette known as the "Bessie," while Klein also gets £30,000 and a limited-edition artwork known as the "Charlotte."
Chair of the fiction judges Monica Ali said, "Brotherless Night is a brilliant, compelling and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war. In rich, evocative prose, Ganeshananthan creates a vivid sense of time and place and an indelible cast of characters. Her commitment to complexity and clear-eyed moral scrutiny combines with spellbinding storytelling to render Brotherless Night a masterpiece of historical fiction."
Suzannah Lipscomb, chair of the nonfiction judges, commented: "This brilliant and layered analysis demonstrates humor, insight and expertise. Klein's writing is both deeply personal and impressively expansive. Doppelganger is a courageous, humane and optimistic call-to-arms that moves us beyond black and white, beyond Right and Left, inviting us instead to embrace the spaces in between."