The winners of the 31st annual Triangle Awards, honoring LGBTQ fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and trans literature published in 2018, have been announced. The awards were presented at a ceremony in New York by the Publishing Triangle, an association of LGBTQ people in publishing, in partnership with the Ferro-Grumley Literary Awards and the New School’s Creative Writing Program in New York City.
The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction was established in 1988 to "recognize, promote excellence in, and give greater access to fiction writing from lesbian and gay points of view." The scope of the award has been widened to embrace work involving bisexuals and trans people. This year's winner was Drapetomania by John R. Gordon (Team Angelica).
The winners of the Shilts-Grahn award for nonfiction, which "recognizes the best nonfiction book of the year by or about lesbians, bisexual women, and/or trans women, or that has a significant influence upon the lives of queer women," went to Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry (Beacon Press).
The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, which "recognizes the best nonfiction book of the year by or about gay men, bisexual men, and/or trans men or that has a significant influence upon the lives of queer men," went to How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
The Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature, which "honors new works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from the non-gender-conforming, non-binary community," was presented to Ely Shipley for Some Animal (Nightboat Books).
The Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, which honors emerging LGBTQ talent," was given to The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara (Ecco/HarperCollins).
The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry was awarded to Hieu Minh Nguyen for Not Here (Coffee House Press), and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry to Margaree Little for Rest (Four Way Books).
The Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, awarded to an LGBTQ writer who has published at least one book but not more than two, was given this year to Julian Randall.
Jaime Manrique received the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, which is given to a "male-identified writer in odd-numbered years and to a female-identified writer in even years." The Publishing Triangle presented its special Leadership Award to Paul Willis.
