Australia’s richest writing prize goes to Melbourne poet for family saga

It’s rare to have eight pages of illustrations in a book of poetry, but there aren’t many collections like Chinese Fish, which on Thursday won Australia’s most generous writing prize – the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature awarded by the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLA). Its author, Grace Yee, also won the VPLA poetry prize, worth another $25,000.

Chinese Fish is a multi-voice, multi-decade saga that focuses on the Chin family – Ping, who is married to Stan; their daughter Cherry; and some of Cherry’s siblings – running a fish and chip shop in New Zealand from the 1960s. The judges said they were “impressed by how intelligently Chinese Fish braids its modes and forms, its feminist vision, and its literary and conceptual sophistication”. Yee said she was overwhelmed to win.

Melbourne-based poet Grace Yee, winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Yee’s family migrated from China to New Zealand in the late 19th century, but their long-term presence counted for little when she encountered incidents of anti-Chinese racism growing up.

“I remember bringing it up with my parents and their response was just to shrug and say, ‘What can you do?’ This is several generations of not dealing with it. Just living with it.”

Other prize winners were Melissa Lucashenko for fiction (Edenglassie); Ellen van Neerven for non-fiction (Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity); Remy Lai for children’s literature (Ghost Book); S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack for drama (The Jungle and The Sea); Daniel Browning for Indigenous writing (Close to the Subject: Selected Works); Lili Wilkinson for writing for young adults (A Hunger of Thorns); Rachel Morton for unpublished manuscript (Panajachel); and Anthony Loewenstein for people’s choice (The Palestine Laboratory).

Chinese Fish was originally the creative element of Yee’s PhD focusing on Chinese women settlers in New Zealand. But when it was finished, she filed the poems away for a few years before deciding to rework them.

While much of the work is from the perspectives of Ping and Cherry, and what Yee refers to as “the orientalist voice”, she also brings in material from old newspapers, more illustrations, Cantonese-Taishanese vocabulary, and a scholarly voice that references the Sinophobic legislation that existed at the time in New Zealand. Her next book, Light Traps: A History, is about Chinese settlers in Australia.

When Melissa Lucashenko won the Miles Franklin in 2019 for her previous novel, Too Much Lip, she said she was next going to write her “big book”. Edenglassie incorporates a 19th-century story set in Meanjin, before the Indigenous population was overwhelmed by settlers, with a contemporary story set in those lands known as Brisbane. Lucashenko said she had been doing research for it on and off since the early 1990s, when she read Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland.

At the heart of the book, which the judges called “storytelling that refuses to endure the ongoing silences and secrecies perpetuating racism and ignorance in this country”, is Lucashenko’s belief in the urgent need for more cross-cultural conversation.

Melissa Lucashenko has won the VPLA fiction category.Credit: Chris Hopkins

“The ramifications of Mabo have only just begun to work themselves out. The yawning gulf of ignorance in mainstream Australia, we’re only just starting to chip away at ... the edifice of white supremacy that was erected over two centuries.”

Another Indigenous writer, Ellen van Neerven, uses memoir, history and poetry in Personal Score, which is about the conflicting issues arising from playing sport on unceded land.

They said it was written in anticipation of the women’s World Cup last year: “Words could not express the joy of that month and the journey the whole nation went on here on home soil. It was such a huge moment for women’s sport in Australia.”

Rachel Morton, who won the unpublished manuscript award for Panajachel, a novel about a woman revisiting a village in Guatemala where she had been 10 years earlier, said she had only previously written poetry; this is her first prose. “It was very much a learning-on-the-job experience with this novel.”

Ellen van Neerven combines memoir, history and poetry in Personal Score.Credit: Chris Hopkins

She said that until she entered the award – which launched the careers of writers such as Jane Harper, Graeme Simsion and Peggy Frew – no one had read her manuscript. “I wasn’t confident that it was any good. But I thought, it’s a competition, so no one will know me. Even if it’s awful, it won’t be embarrassing. It felt much less scary to submit to this than it would be, say, to give it to a friend to read.”

She has subsequently done that, but her friends haven’t got back to her yet.

“I was starting to get really worried, but now that I’ve won this, I’m a bit less worried.”

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