Romeo Oriogun and Sulaiman Addonia are on this year’s shortlist for the Lambda Awards.
Romeo is shortlisted for his debut full-length poetry collection Sacrament of Bodies for the Lambda Award for Best Gay Poetry.
Sulaiman Adonnia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue is a finalist in the Bisexual Fiction category.
The Lambda Awards is organized yearly to award LGBTQ writers in the US. The ceremony is known as the Lammys.
Romeo’s Sacrament of Bodies is a meditation on love and pain, joy and overcoming. It was published on 1 March 2020 by the University of Nebraska Press.
Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue was first published in the UK by The Indigo Press in 2018 and later released in the US by Graywolf Press in 2020. The story, set in a refugee camp in Sudan, follows a girl, Saba, and her “mute brother,” Hagos. The Kirkus Reviews called it “a memorable chronicle about ‘the bitterness of exile’ and the endurance of the spirit.
In the past years, African writers have been nominated for the Lambda Awards. Chinelo Okparanta won twice for Lesbian Fiction, for her 2013 story collection and her 2016 novel. The anthology Queer Africa, edited by the South Africans Makhosazana Xaba and Karen Martin, won the LGBTQ Anthology category in 2014. Chike Frankie Edozien won for Gay Memoir in 2017. In 2018, the Gerald Kraak Prize’s second anthology As You Like It won the LGBTQ Fiction Anthology category.
See the full list of shortlisted writers here
Source from Graywolf Press and University of Nebraska Press
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