Canadian authors Zoe Whittall, Sarah Leavitt and Jes Battis shortlisted for 2SLGBTQ+ writing awards
The Lambda Literary Awards celebrate 2SLGBTQ+ storytelling
Authors Zoe Whittall, Sarah Leavitt and Jes Battis are among the Canadian writers shortlisted for one of 26 Lambda Literary Awards.
The Lambda Literary Awards have celebrated 2SLGBTQ+ storytelling for 37 years. This year, a panel of 80 literary professionals selected finalists in 26 categories from 1,339 submissions.
Whittall is shortlisted in the LGBTQ+ Poetry category for her book No Credit River.
In No Credit River, Whittall brings readers along through six years of her life which include the loss of a pregnancy, a global pandemic and abandoned love. Honest, emotional and painful, the collection of prose poems examines anxiety and creativity in the modern world as well as the intersection of motherhood and queerness.
Whittall is an author, poet and screenwriter based in Prince Edward County, Ont. Her past works include the short story collection Wild Failure and the novels The Fake, The Best Kind of People and Bottle Rocket Hearts.
Her previous poetry collections include The Emily Valentine Poems and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life. She has received the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award, a Lambda Literary Award and been shortlisted for the Giller Prize.
Leavitt's graphic novel Something, Not Nothing is nominated for the award for LGBTQ+ Comics.
Following the medically assisted death of her partner of 22 years, Leavitt began small sketches that quickly became something new and unexpected to her. The abstract images mixed with poetic text, layers of watercolour, ink and coloured pencil combine in Something, Not Nothing to tell a story of love, grief, peace and new beginnings.
Leavitt is a Vancouver comics creator and writing teacher. Her debut book was Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me. Something, Not Nothing was nominated for a 2025 Eisner Award for best graphic memoir.
Battis is nominated in the LGBTQ+ Poetry category for his collection I Hate Parties.
Collecting 50 poems, I Hate Parties shares Jes Battis' experiences of being queer, autistic and nonbinary. Focusing on the feelings of intense anxiety that come with growing up in the nineties in Canada as a marginalized person, Battis writes of adolescence, queer parties and panic attacks through metaphor and honest verse.
Battis is a writer and teacher at the University of Regina, splitting their time between the prairies and the west coast. They wrote the Occult Special Investigator series and Parallel Parks series. Battis' first novel, Night Child, was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award. Their novel The Winter Knight was on the Canada Reads 2024 longlist.
Other Canadian writers shortlisted are Harman Burns, RJ McDaniel, Amin Ghaziani, Maggie Horne, Makram Ayache, Nick Green, Erica N. Cardwell, Nathan Mader and Julie Delporte.
Burns, based in Vancouver, is nominated in the Transgender Fiction category for her novella Yellow Barks Spider. Vancouver writer McDaniel is also nominated in the same category for their novel All Things Seen and Unseen.
Ghaziani, the Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at the University of British Columbia, is shortlisted for the LGBTQ+ Nonfiction prize for Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution.
Horne, who grew up near Toronto and now lives in the U.K., is recognized in the LGBTQ+ Middle Grade category for Noah Frye Gets Crushed.
Toronto playwrights Ayache and Green are nominated for their plays The Green Line and Casey and Diana, respectively.
Based in Brooklyn and Toronto, Cardwell is nominated in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography category for Wrong is Not My Name. Mader is a Regina-born poet currently living in Kyoto, Japan. He is nominated in the bisexual poetry category for his book The Endless Animal. Montreal comic creator Delporte's graphic memoir Portrait of a Body is shortlisted in the same category.
American writer Casey McQuiston and British author Alan Hollinghurst also made the shortlist and have appeared on Bookends with Mattea Roach. McQuiston's The Pairing is nominated for Bisexual Fiction and Hollinghurst's Our Evenings is nominated for Gay Fiction.
The complete list of 2025 finalists is available on the Lambda Literary Award website.
The winners will be announced at a virtual ceremony on Oct. 4, 2025.
