Spotlighting Our 2026 Lambda Literary Award Winners
For more than 30 years, the Lambda Literary Awards, affectionately known as the Lammys, have recognized the profound impact LGBTQ+ authors have made on literature and culture. We’re thrilled to celebrate the Penguin Random House authors and books that were selected as winners at the 2026 Lambda Literary Awards. View the full list here.
Since its inception in 1989, the Lambda Literary Awards have recognized more than 3,500 books as finalists or winners, celebrating the most outstanding works in LGBTQ+ literature. Lambda Literary nurtures and advocates for LGBTQ writers, elevating the impact of their words to create community, preserve our legacies, and affirm the value of our stories and our lives.
This year’s winners were selected from a competitive field of finalists chosen by Lambda Literary’s panel of judges. Each category is judged by a panel of three judges (four for our larger categories) selected primarily from Lambda’s extensive community of readers, authors, fellows, former finalists, and other stakeholders, provided they themselves do not have titles eligible during the award year.
Congratulations to our incredible authors and publishing teams on these recognitions!
Our Lambda Literary Awards Winners
Bisexual Nonfiction
The frank and revealing memoir of a writer who draws from her own creativity to heal.
Drawing on her background — her father’s abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women — and her creative life as an author and teacher, Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul.
LGBTQ+ Children’s Books
The award-winning picture book biography of the late, great James Marshall—illustrator of Miss Nelson is Missing and the George and Martha series—as clever, delightful, and daring as Jim himself, and featuring detailed backmatter, including a robust author’s note and timeline.
Author and illustrator James Marshall let kids in on the joke. He knew little kids were smart, and he didn’t talk down to them in his stories. He was right—kids loved his picture books. Decades after his death, the characters he illustrated—Miss Nelson, Viola Swamp, George and Martha, Goldilocks, Fox and His Friends—are still beloved. James Marshall should be at least as famous as his characters, and now he is, in his own picture book biography.
LGBTQ+ Middle Grade
A middle grade novel in verse about a young trans girl who uses a computer game to process an ADHD diagnosis, isolation, and her relationship to gender.
J—’s life is consumed by the roller coaster video game Coaster Boss, and by the power she exerts over the pixelated theme park attendees. Her life outside the game, however, is less controllable.
LGBTQ+ Romance and Erotica
From the acclaimed author of Chef’s Kiss, a groundbreaking trans Regency romance that’s both delightfully witty and refreshingly iconoclastic.
The notoriously eccentric Lord Christopher Eden is a “man of unusual make” and even more unusual habits: he prefers to live far from the prying eyes and ears of the ton, and would rather have the comfortable company of his childhood cook and his aged butler than the swarm of servants and hangers-on befitting a man of his station. But Christopher’s pleasant, if occasionally lonely life is upended when he receives word from his lawyers that, according to his late father’s will, he must find a wife by the end of the Season if he intends to keep his family’s fortune and the Eden estate.
Transgender Fiction
A moving and deeply humane story about a trans man who must relinquish the freedoms of prewar Berlin to survive first the Nazis then the Allies, all while protecting the ones he loves
In 1932 Berlin, a trans man named Bertie and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond. But everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The Institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up.