Lambda Literary is excited to announce Christopher Tradowsky as the 2023 winner of the J. Michael Samuel Prize for Emerging Writers Over 50.
The J. Michael Samuel Prize honors emerging LGBTQ writers over the age of 50. The award is made possible by writer and philanthropist Chuck Forester, who created it out of the firmly held belief that “Writers who start late are just as good as other writers, it just took the buggers more time.” The prize is awarded to an unpublished LGBTQ writer over 50 working in any genre and includes a cash prize of $5,000.
About Paul Festa
Paul Festa’s essays appear in The New York Times Book Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, his poetry in Fauxmoir and Beyond Words. Before winning Lambda Literary’s 2024 J. Michael Samuel Prize for Emerging Writers over 50, his novel-in-progress MATERANO was short-listed for the CRAFT First Chapters Contest and the New Millennium Writing Awards. His critically acclaimed experimental documentaries include Apparition of the Eternal Church, about the music of Olivier Messiaen, and Tie It Into My Hand, a rhapsodic discussion of the artist’s life with Harold Bloom, Wayne Koestenbaum, Alan Cumming, Margaret Cho, and Robert Pinsky. His performance installation Night of a Thousand Agneses, starring founding Sister of Perpetual Indulgence Agnes de Garron, was nominated for the Berlin Arts Prize. His sculpture has shown in Berlin at BauStelle and Pandora Art Gallery, and his photography appears in RFD and Beyond Words. As violinist, he has performed at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and the Library of Congress, and in his award-winning silent-film comedy The Glitter Emergency. Paul has taught courses at Bard College Berlin in literature, philosophy, video production, fiction writing, modern Italian history, and music history.
On Festa’s work, a judge remarked:
On every page, in every paragraph, Paul Festa’s prose is audacious. With wicked humor and the charm of an inborn raconteur, Festa entices us through the portal of a 21st century Berlin demimonde, leading God-knows-where. This much seems certain: the journey will be raucous, raunchy, hilarious, dazzling on the surface, and deeply, profoundly queer.
Materano is wryly funny, melancholy, and deeply filthy by turns, a much-needed meditation on queer adulthood, pleasure, and mortality in the age of societal collapse, from the perspective of someone who’s already lived through hard times. Paul Festa’s prose sparkles, and his narrator feels like a friend whose gimlet-eyed examination of 21st century queer life is both disconcerting and a comfort. I look forward to seeing much more from this talented writer!
