I posted about this on SF Awards Watch yesterday. It is a relatively new UK-based prize for fiction and memoirs by LGBT people. While it is a general fiction prize, the people behind it say they are very very happy to receive SF/F/H works as submissions. There’s no Booker-style snobbery here. They will probably be looking for more of a literary style, but we have no shortage of people who can do that, and it would be a shame if we didn’t submit. There’s a real opportunity to get some recognition here.
I note also that the jury is quite interesting. Stella Duffy, people!
You do have to get your publisher to submit your book, and I know from experience with the Lammys that this can be difficult, but it isn’t impossible. Cat Valente, after all, won a Lammy. I see no reason why she can’t win this too. Night Shade people, if you are reading this…
I should point out here that although the prize is UK-based, they tell me that they are happy to accept books as long as they are readily available in the UK. I know Night Shade get books into Waterstones.
More information about the prize is available on SFAW and on the prize’s official website.
Am I correct to assume that “by LGBT people” means “by LGBT people who are publicly out of the closet and whose queerness is verifiable in some fashion”? Because last I heard, the Lammies were evaluating the LGBTness of authors by whether their back-of-the-book bios listed same-sex or different-sex partners, and that’s some bullshit.
I guess there will always be people who think they can get onto a prize shortlist by faking their credentials, even if that involved pretending to be LGBT. So I kind of understand the problem, and would personally be much happier with different eligibility criteria. However, this is a much smaller operation than the Lammys, and British people are probably less likely to be willing to ask pointedly about such things, reserved creatures that we are.
I’ll drop an email to Simon Savidge and point him at your comment. Hopefully he can put your mind at rest.
I wasn’t concerned about fraud; quite the opposite. The issue with the Lammies is that limiting it to out queer people with same-sex partners is exclusionary of queers like myself in different-sex partnerships, of het trans people, and of writers who don’t feel comfortable outing themselves.
The whole author bio thing came about, as I understand it, precisely because the people running the Lammies were not willing to write to authors and say “Pardon me, but are you LGBT?”. But if you’d rather preserve your own comfort and exclude qualifying authors than ask whether people meet your stated criteria for qualification, then IMO you shouldn’t be running an award with qualification requirements of that sort.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that you were concerned about fraud. But I’m assuming that the Lammy’s are, because otherwise they would not be trying to police the eligibility criteria.
I always assumed they were trying to police it because publishers often submit books based on *gasp* their content, sometimes without the author’s permission or knowledge, and since the Lammy award administrators are the ones who put the criteria in place, they’re the ones who are stuck with verifying that the books and authors do in fact qualify.
I personally think this is all pretty stupid and that if e.g. a straight woman can write a gay romance that is better than any of the gay romances written by gay men, she deserves to win the price and the gay male writers need to step up their game. But I realize not everyone shares my views here.