Lambda Literary is pleased to announce R. O. Kwon and Carter Sickels as the winners of the 2025 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize!
Dedicated to the memory of author and journalist Jim Duggins, this prize honors LGBTQ-identified authors who have published multiple novels, built a strong reputation and following, and show promise to continue publishing high quality work for years to come. This award is made possible by the James Duggins, PhD Fund for Outstanding Mid-Career LGBTQ Novelists, a fund of the Horizons Foundation, and includes a cash prize of $5,000.
R. O. Kwon
R. O. Kwon is the author of the nationally bestselling novel Exhibit. Kwon’s bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize. Kwon coedited the bestselling Kink. Kwon’s books have been translated into seven languages and named a best book of the year by over forty publications. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and MacDowell. She is a 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.
R. O. Kwon’s work often explores questions of desire and faith—both how they can drive and define us, as well as what happens when they’re lost. Her novel-in-progress, Thieving, will explore the displacement and rightful stewardship of ancient cultural artifacts, and will share a fictional world with her first two excellent novels, The Incendiaries and Exhibit. Kwon’s second novel (Exhibit, published in 2024) centers the sexuality of two queer Korean American women artists who help each other live more freely and discover their true selves. Kwon also co-edited (with Garth Greenwell) a vital anthology of stories entitled Kink that, like all of Kwon’s terrific work, raises “questions of power, agency, identity.”
A Word from R. O. Kwon
Dear Lambda Literary, dear friends and family, hello, everyone. I am so utterly delighted to be celebrating with you tonight.
Thank you so much to Lambda Literary for the Jim Duggins Special Prize, one of the great honors of my life. I’m intensely grateful to you all for the beautiful, vital, strengthening work you do. And thank you to the judges for your dedication and care.
Thank you to my agent Ellen Levine, steadfast champion of letters and writers, and to Lauren Champlin. I’m thankful to my publisher, Riverhead, and to Laura Perciasepe, Alison Fairbrother, Sarah McGrath, Glory Anne Plata, Hannah Lopez, Nora Ann Demick, Viviann Do, and Afarin Allabakhshizadeh, among others. Thank you to the friends and heroes who supported me along the way with my most recent novel, Exhibit, which was published last year.
On a personal note, the writing and publication of Exhibit came with greatly heightened anxiety: the novel’s central concerns, including queer sexuality, felt all but prohibited for me, a Korean American woman raised deeply Christian, now apostate. Since Exhibit was published, I’ve been at an artistic crossroads, finding my way through newly intensified questions about novels’ possibilities. Tonight’s honor shines a bright light during what has been a profound, ongoing transformation.
In this very difficult time for the country we inhabit, I’m more grateful than I’ve ever been for the fellowship and possibility that books can give, and your work helps make the reading and writing of queer literature possible. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Carter Sickels
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, the 2021 Southern Book Prize, and the Weatherford Award, and selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012) was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His writing has appeared in various publications including The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and Guernica.
Carter was a 2024 finalist for the John Dos Passos Prize in Literature and the Granum Prize. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and VCCA. Carter is an assistant professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University.
A Word from Carter Sickels
I’m honored to accept the Jim Duggins Prize. Thank you to Lambda Literary and to the judges for this award and for recognizing my work. I’ve been writing queer stories for over 20 years, but I didn’t publish my first novel until I was thirty-nine. Around that time, just before the novel was published, I came out as trans. And, not long after that, Lambda Literary honored me with the Emerging Writer award. So it is particularly poignant and moving to now receive this mid- career recognition. I’m honored to receive an award that also went to a long list of authors whose work I deeply respect and who are my mentors. I would not be here if it weren’t for all the queer and trans writers who helped create a path, and whose work has held me and inspired me and challenged me. I am standing on your immense, gorgeous shoulders. And, to all my fellow trans writers, thank you. I’m grateful for you and your words and your courage. We’re still here. Let us not be silent. Let’s take care of each other and lift each other up and remember that we’re not alone. Keep on creating and writing and imagining and sharing queer and trans stories.
