Melissa Lucashenko has won the top prize at the Queensland Literary Awards for her novel Edenglassie.
It’s the second time the Bundjalung author has won the $30,000 Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, with her novel Too Much Lip taking it out in 2019.
“It was great to win it once and it’s wonderful to win it a second time,” Lucashenko told AAP.
Described by the judges as an “historical tapestry that tears down barriers between past and present”, Edenglassie weaves together the stories of modern day characters and of the colonial unrest of the 1800s.
Lucashenko said the two time periods in the novel draw attention to the fact “things haven’t changed all that much” over the past 200 years.
“First Nations people, we continue to deal with colonialism each and every day,” she said.
“But I also use the two time periods to make it absolutely clear to my readers that we’re not an extinct or dying race.”
Lucashenko dedicated her win to the memory of educator and linguist Aunty Jeanie Bell, a senior Jagera woman from southeast Queensland.
Lucashenko is among five First Nations winners at the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards’ 12 categories.
Sharlene Allsopp’s debut novel The Great Undoing won the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award.
A First Nations perspective on history is central to Allsopp’s novel, which judges said “disrupts reader’s understandings of time, telling and place to ask how much of our histories are taken – and who gets to tell our stories”.
The Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection was taken out by John Morrissey’s Firelight.
Cheryl Leavy won one of three $20,000 Queensland Writers Fellowships for her poetry and essay project Mudhunda -Song Country.
The David Unaipon Award for an Emerging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Writer went to Dominic Guerrera for his poetry manuscript Native Rage.
The Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna man says the win is reassurance he’s on the right path with his work, and means the publication of the collection.
“It’s a huge milestone,” he said.
“It’s what I’ve been working on for the past six years, to get this collection together.”
Guerrera said his work was inspired by his grandmother Margaret Brusnahan, also a poet, his family and the wider South Australian Aboriginal community.
“My grandmother put the spark of poetry in me, along with a lot of my family and I’ve just always been writing poetry,” he said.
