Eagland's 'Wildthorn' Wins Lambda in Children/YA Category
RSSBy Debra Lau Whelan
Jane Eagland's Wildthorn (Houghton, 2010), a historical romance set in Victorian England, is a winner of the 23rd Lambda Literary Awards in the children's and young adult category, an honor given annually by the U.S.-based Lambda Literary Foundation to works that celebrate or explore lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) themes. When she was nominated in March, Eagland told SLJ she didn't think about making Louisa gay when she set out to write Wildthorn. "It was only in the process of writing that I discovered that she experienced passionate feelings for her cousin, Grace," Eagland said. "It just felt right." Although some people have said that such relationships would have been completely unacceptable back then, Eagland explains that "romantic friendships" between girls at the time were in fact accepted. "It was only later that they were regarded with suspicion and defined as "transgressive," she says. Originally published in the U.K., this provocative romance pushes boundaries-both literary and figurative-and Louisa's guilt feels "like a straitjacket that she has to struggle to break free of in the same way that she has to struggle against the role society tried to impose on all middle class women at that time," Eagland said. And that message still has meaning today. "I guess it would be good if young readers could identify with her and see the dangers of the self-imposed closet." Eagland says it was too far to travel to the ceremony in New York, but now wishes she had-because she also could have also seen see Scottish crime writer Val McDermid and three-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Edward Albee, receive their Pioneer Awards, given to individuals who have broken new ground in the field of LGBT literature and publishing. "Owing to the time difference between the states and England, I was asleep at the moment the award was announced," Eagland says. But when she woke last Friday, the first thing she did was check the Lambda website. "I saw that Wildthorn had won, but I didn't believe it! It was only when the email came from Tony Valenzuela that I accepted it was true and started leaping up and down with excitement." Eagland's second novel, Whisper My Name, is coming out soon, and she's currently working on a third.
Eagland (left) says she's "absolutely delighted" by the award, which means even more to her because this is her first novel-and her first award. "One thing I hope might come of it is that more young readers will read the book," wrote Eagland in an email from her home in England just before leaving for a three-week vacation to Cornwall. "It presents an unconventional relationship in a positive way, and I hope that some readers might be encouraged by that and others might question their assumptions. But mostly, I hope they'll enjoy the story."
Eagland, one of five finalists announced in March, beat Vivek Shraya, author of the self-published God Loves Hair (Vivek Shraya, 2010), an anthology of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality, religion, and his hair; James Klise, who wrote Love Drugged (Flux, 2011), a story about 15-year-old Jamie Bates who tries to hide his sexuality and does all he can to change who he is when the truth comes out; Catherine Ryan Hyde, whose Jumpstart the World (Random, 2010) was a Lambda finalist in two categories (also transgender fiction); and Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, whose Christian, the Hugging Lion, (2010, both S & S), illustrated by Amy June Bates, is the true story of two men who release their adopted lion cub into the wildness and are reunited with the wild animal years later.
