Bisexual Book Awards
The Bisexual Book Awards were an annual literary award program, presented by the Bi Writers Association to honour the year's best works of literature addressing themes of bisexuality. The awards were presented for the first time in 2013. Sheela Lambert founded and organized the awards until 2021.
History
Bisexual activists Sheela Lambert, Wendy Curry, and Amy Andre asked the long-running Lambda Literary Awards to include a category on bisexual literature but were rebuffed due to Lambda Literary's perception that there weren't enough bisexual books to support a category. The activists and others searched for bisexual books on the internet until they found enough to start the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Literature in 2006. Eventually the award grew to two, but in 2012 it again shrank to one category, and Lambert felt she had to add more options for authors of bisexual literature to be recognized. Previously, Mike Szymanski and other authors had asked Lambert to create an award for the bi+ community.The first Bisexual Book Awards launched in 2013. The number of categories and books steadily grew in its first years, with 6 categories and 60 submissions in the second year, and 10 categories and 72 books in the third. Lambert organized the awards but recruited judges to help select winners.
Awards were presented in 11 categories, where any writer who addressed bisexual themes in their work could be submitted for consideration regardless of their own sexual orientation. Two special awards were also presented: the Bi Book Publisher Award to the publishing company that had submitted the most books to the awards program that year, and the Bi Writer Award for the best book by an out bisexual writer.
Book Riot criticized the 2018 Bisexual Book Awards for its unrepresentative slate of winners and ceremony invitees, who were overwhelmingly white.
Though winners for books published in 2021 were supposed to be announced on 28 January 2023, founder Sheela Lambert was hospitalized with COVID-19 and pneumonia two weeks prior and the awards were put on hold. In April 2024, the Bi Writers Association Facebook page announced that Lambert had died earlier in the year "due to complications from chronic illness"; while the post also expressed desire to award both the 2021 and 2022 awards, this has yet to occur.