On June 12, 2026, Lambda Literary returned to Sony Hall to announce the winners of the 38th Annual Lambda Literary Awards. A panel of 80 literary professionals selected winners from more than 1,300 book submissions across over 300 publishers. The Lammys cover 26 categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, romance, and more. But the four identity-specific fiction awards sit at the heart of what the ceremony has always been about. Naming the best queer novels of the year. Putting them in front of readers who need them.
Here’s who won, and why it matters.
Lesbian Fiction: Hungerstone by Kat Dunn
Zando | Gothic horror, sapphic, Carmilla retelling
Before Dracula, there was Carmilla. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella predated Stoker by over two decades. It was a story of lesbian vampirism and female desire, and it has never been more relevant. Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone is its most ferocious modern descendant.
It’s the height of the Industrial Revolution. Lenore has been married to steel magnate Henry for a decade. When his ambitions take them from London to a remote country estate on the British moorlands, a carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla into their lives. Carmilla, who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night. Carmilla, who stirs something deep within Lenore. Soon, girls from local villages fall sick, consumed by a terrible hunger, and Lenore begins to unravel.
What Dunn does with the source material is pull its feminist subtext to the surface and make it the whole point. Lenore contrasts sharply with Carmilla, who from her arrival is unafraid to demand things. Lenore resents Carmilla before she desires her. It’s an uncomfortable, convincing detail. She has learned to mistake her endless willingness to endure mistreatment for rationality. Trained to pride herself on not being like other women, she can’t see what she’s lost.
Hungerstone became a national bestseller and an NPR Best Book of the Year. It is the sapphic gothic novel that has been waiting to exist since the original Carmilla appeared. Atmospheric, blood-drenched, and genuinely frightening. The horror that lingers is less supernatural than social.
Gay Fiction: Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter
Nightboat Books | Literary fiction, AIDS elegy, London queer history, debut
Charlie Porter is a fashion critic and curator. He has spent decades writing about clothes, artists, and the aesthetics of queer life in London. Nova Scotia House is his debut novel. It’s the kind of book that makes you wonder what took so long, and immediately grateful it arrived at all.
The novel is both a love story and a lament. Johnny looks back at his relationship with his life partner, Jerry, after Jerry’s AIDS-related death. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19 and Jerry was 45. They made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today. Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.
Porter writes with urgent, intimate prose that blends tenderness with raw intensity. The narrative is non-linear. Johnny’s reflections jump across decades to mirror the fragmented nature of memory and loss during the AIDS era. The sentences are short and staccato, arriving like breath. The sexuality is explicit in a way that feels political rather than gratuitous. A refusal to sanitize what queer life actually was.
The novel is also a book about ideas. It asks: how can we reconnect with radical queerness? How can we live as fully and optimistically as possible? Porter asks this through a character who is grieving. That he still arrives at something like hope is what makes the book essential.
Shortlisted for the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize. Named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and the Guardian.
Bisexual Fiction: Sympathy for Wild Girls by Demree McGhee
The Feminist Press | Short stories, queer Black women, magical realism, debut
Demree McGhee’s debut is 15 stories about Black, queer girls and women. They navigate a world that is only slightly more surreal than the one they already inhabit. Young Black women yearn for intimacy and hunt for belonging in a subtly warped reality, where social mores loom like shadows and bigotry shape-shifts.
A runaway seeks shelter with a pack of wild coyotes. A young woman falls in with hypocritical white Christian YouTube influencers. A mother watches her daughter’s prophecy about the end of the world come true. The premises sound fabulist, and they are. But McGhee’s real subject is the ordinary horror of existing in a body the world has decided is dangerous or expendable.
McGhee harnesses language and narrative into a new kind of vessel. It holds what it feels like to be young and Black and queer. Not every story fully lands, but each one takes unexpected risks. The collection has been compared to Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. That’s a reasonable shorthand, but McGhee’s voice is her own. More grounded in the social textures of contemporary Black life. More interested in the specific grief of female friendship that can’t quite name itself.
One of the most striking debut collections in recent memory. A book that deserves readers well beyond the awards circuit.
Transgender Fiction: The Lilac People by Milo Todd
Counterpoint Press | Historical fiction, Weimar Berlin, trans history, WWII, debut
Milo Todd spent years researching a chapter of queer history that most World War II narratives have erased. The result is a debut novel of extraordinary urgency. It is the story of trans men surviving not just the Nazis, but the Allies who came after.
In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, spends carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. He works at Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science, advancing queer rights in Germany and beyond. Then Hitler rises to power. The institute is raided. The Eldorado is shuttered. Queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm.
The novel’s dual timeline reveals something even many LGBTQ+ readers won’t know. Survivors with pink or black triangles on their uniforms faced further imprisonment. The Allies upheld the Nazis’ harsher anti-LGBTQ+ laws. After liberation came more persecution. The book refuses to let that vanish back into footnotes.
Todd carves out moments of trans joy for Bertie to hold onto while atrocities attempt to break his spirit. This is what separates the novel from a catalogue of suffering. It insists, right alongside its horror, on the fullness of the lives being threatened.
A national bestseller, an ALA Notable Book, and a Stonewall Book Award honor title. The Lilac People is the kind of historical fiction that doesn’t let you feel safely removed from what it’s describing. The parallels to the present are not subtle. Todd doesn’t want them to be.
