Award-Winning Memoirs You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

This is my favorite kind of queer memoir: it’s a collection of stories, both personal and community-oriented. Nigerian journalist Chike Frankie shares his own experiences as a gay man living in Lagos, but he travels throughout Nigeria, Africa, and the world, speaking with other queer Africans about their lives. He writes about the challenges LGBTQ+ Nigerians face, the devastating impacts of Western homophobia across Africa, and the many ways that queer Africans, both in their home countries and across the diaspora, are building vibrant, and joyful lives.

This is one of my favorite books of the year so far and I’m not going to stop shouting about it until everyone has read it! Alabanza is a trans writer and performer based in the UK. This memoir is structured around seven phrases — some deeply transphobic and painful, and some affirming — that have been spoken to them throughout their life. They use these phrases as jumping-off points to reflect on their life as a visibly femme and nonbinary person, the complicated intersections of gender and race, the power of queer performance and community, and so much more.

In this personal memoir, Chinese novelist Xiaolu Guo shares with readers the many journeys that have defined her life. She recounts her childhood with her grandparents in a small village on the coast, the years she spent in Beijing, and her eventual choice to immigrate to Europe. She paints a complicated portrait of China in the 1980s and 1990s, and offers a powerful reflection on her own coming of age as an artist, writer, and woman.

Tessa McWatt, like so many mixed-raced people, has been plagued by intrusive questions about her identity since she was a child. In this memoir, she rejects the simplistic and racist question “what are you?” and instead turns to her body and personal history to ask (and sometimes answer) her own questions about race, color, geography, and identity. She traces her family’s history through China, the Caribbean, India, Europe, and Canada, untangling the many complicated threads that make up her story.

I’m always keen to read memoirs by poets, and this gorgeous work by Brandon Shimoda illustrates why. It’s a poetic, multimedia ode to his Japanese grandfather, an exploration of 20th Japanese American history, and a meditation on memory. Shimoda’s grandfather, a Japanese immigrant who was interred during WWII, died when Shimoda was young. In an attempt to learn more about him, Shimoda travels from the U.S. to Japan and back. This is a moving family portrait and a powerful indictment of U.S. imperialism.

In this brilliant blend of memoir, science writing, and journalism, Daisy Hernández delves into the history and politics of Chagas, an infectious disease transmitted by insects. Her aunt died of the illness when she was a child, but her family never talked about it. As an adult, Hernández is determined to find out why — why is this disease unknown to so many Americans, while other diseases get heaps of attention and funding for research? In sharing her own family’s history with Chagas, she illuminates the systemic issues — medical racism, poverty, poor public health policy — that have kept it hidden for so long.

Several books about ACT UP have come out in recent years, from Sarah Schulman’s massive oral history Let the Record Show to Rasheed Newson’s historical novel My Government Means to Kill Me. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as too many — the work ACT UP was doing in the 1980s and 1990s was radical and revolutionary and is still a powerful model for activists today. In this memoir, Ron Goldberg, an active member of ACT UP in the late 1980s and 1990s, shares his stories of being a gay activist during the AIDS epidemic in New York, recounting the many protests, meetings, and other ACT UP events he led and attended.

Through a series of diary entries, 15-year-old Dara McAnulty chronicles the changing of the seasons over the course of a year in his Northern Ireland home. Interspersed with observations of the natural world, he shares his experiences as an autistic teenager and reflects on his burgeoning environmental activism. This is a beautifully moving memoir about a teenager’s deep connection with nature.