Lambda Literary is pleased to announce Taz Urnov as the winner of the Denneny Prize for Editorial Excellence!
The prize is named in honor of Michael Denneny, who founded the first-ever LGBTQ+ imprint at a major publishing house, was essential in the publishing of literature dealing with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and so generously shared his talents with writers right up until the end of his life. The award will go to an editor whose commitment to the publication of LGBTQ+ writers and literature contributes significantly to the advancement of the LGBTQ+ community. The Denneny Award for Editorial Excellence is the only editorial award that not only recognizes the support provided by editors to the literary community, but also the importance of editors in the advancement of a social movement. The winner will receive a cash prize of $2,500.
Taz Urnov
Taz Urnov is an editor at New York City–based independent publisher Soho Press, curating crime and horror fiction for the imprints Soho Crime and Hell’s Hundred. They joined Soho in 2021 following work in translation, linguistics, and education. Taz’s acquisitions for Soho have been reviewed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post and won notable literary awards including the CWA Dagger, Anthony Award, Shamus Award, and ALA Reading List Award. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and DFW metroplex on a steady diet of books and the Beatles, she is fluent in Russian and French and plays the bass in two bands.
We are so pleased to award this honor to Taz Urnov for their ongoing work championing queer writing—particularly queer writing in translation—at Soho House. We were enormously impressed with the caliber of work that Urnov does, both for queer writers and translators. Urnov has a history of actively lobbying for fair pay for contract workers, often securing above-industry-average royalties for translators especially. This commitment to creating sustainable ecosystems for queer creatives is crucial to building a more accessible and equitable industry. In their work as an editor, they have shown themselves to be thoughtful, accommodating, collaborative, and attentive to the particularities of LGBTQ+ narratives; Unov champions queer characters with depth and complexity—including those with the capacity for cruelty, pettiness, and violence. Their recent novels bring to the US queer work from Turkey and Japan, and we were excited to learn that Urnov would shortly be turning their particular editorial ethos to Soho House’s new horror imprint. In this period of profound American xenophobia, queer book bans, and increasingly dangerous legislation against our trans siblings in particular, we hold profound admiration for the work Urnov is doing, and very much look forward to the novels they champion and curate next. It is an absolute pleasure to name Taz Urnov as the recipient of this year’s Denneny Award for Editorial Excellence.
