Andrew Solomon Wins Green Carnation Prize for Far from the Tree

A National Book Award winner and Pulitzer finalist for his depression book The Noonday Demon [Kindle], Andrew Solomon's follow-up about variant children, Far From the Tree, has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and now the Green Carnation Prize for the best book by an lgbt author.

I was hoping the judges might declare a tie between that amazing book and Neil McKenna's wonderful, less trumpeted Fanny and Stella, a biography of two London men who dressed as women in 1870.

Said Solomon: "I am profoundly honored and utterly thrilled to have won this prize.  When I was born, it was a crime, a sin, and a mental illness to be gay; now it is an identity, and a much celebrated one at that, as the very existence of this prize clearly demonstrates.  My book is about how we can use that shift, of which gay people today are the fortunate beneficiaries, as a model for helping others with stigmatized differences to find dignity in them.  I believe with all my heart in a prize that celebrates the particular contributions of gay literature, and that recognizes that human diversity, like species diversity, is necessary to sustain the world as we know and love it.  I am delighted to play any part in putting forward that idea, and I thank the judges with all my heart."