‘Not a complete waste of time’: Novelist nabs Qld Premier’s Award again
By Nick Dent
Brisbane author Melissa Lucashenko has won the Queensland Premier’s Award for literature for the second time with her novel Edenglassie.
Set in Brisbane in the 1840s and the present day, Edenglassie won the $30,000 prize, which Lucashenko previously won in 2019 for her book Too Much Lip.
“All awards are great, but this is a special one for a Brisbane girl,” Lucashenko said.
“I find it bizarre when people don’t know the stories of the place that they live,” said Brisbane author Melissa Lucashenko.Credit: Joe Ruckli
“It makes you feel like four years’ slaving over a hot laptop wasn’t a complete waste of time.”
A writer famed for her vivid characters, Lucashenko, who has Bundjalung and European heritage, is known as something of a character herself.
She is the only person to have won both the Miles Franklin Award – Australia’s top literary prize – and TV game show Millionaire Hot Seat.
Edenglassie was described by the QLA judges as a “historical tapestry that tears down barriers between past and present” and a book that “elevates our understanding of Queensland’s soul”.
Lucashenko said that the book includes the historical character of Scottish farmer Thomas Petrie, who negotiated a treaty with local Aboriginal people and established a refuge for them.
“Modern Queensland is still trying to catch up to the example of Tom Petrie in the 1840s,” she said.
The Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance is the top prize in the Queensland Literary Awards, announced at the State Library of Queensland.
Published books that have won Queensland Literary Awards 2024.Credit: State Library of Queensland
Another First Nations writer, Sharlene Allsopp, won the $15,000 University of Queensland Fiction Book Award for her debut novel The Great Undoing.
Allsopp’s book is about a woman in a dystopian future who writes her own version of history in the margins of a copy of Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia (1916).
Allsopp said she was excited to get her book into more people’s hands.
Bundjalung author Sharlene Allsopp’s debut novel imagines a tech apocalypse.
“I also hope that they might ask more questions about how we record history, who gets to record history, and how those stories we tell about our past have the potential to reshape the future,” she said.
The $15,000 University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award went to Abbas El-Zein for Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars, his account of his childhood in Lebanon.
The Spider and Her Demons by sydney khoo, the story of a high school girl who has a double life as a spider demon, won the $15,000 Young Adult Book Award.
The awards total $276,000 in prize money awarded across 12 categories including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and published and unpublished work.
Arts Minister Leeane Enoch said the Queensland Literary Awards “recognise and celebrate the power of stories and storytellers to generate inspiration, empathy and entertainment within and across communities”.