Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, has won the top prize at the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards.
Lucashenko’s epic novel of Aboriginal lives five generations apart won the $30,000 Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance. It’s the second time the Bundjalung, Goorie author has won the award, with her novel Too Much Lip picking up the top prize in 2019.
Other winners
Brisbane-based Bundjalung writer, Sharlene Allsopp, debut novel The Great Undoing won The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, with a prize of $15,000. Allsopp’s novel is a re-mapping of history told through First Nations perspectives.
Judges called her book “an anti-colonial collage” that “disrupts readers’ understanding of time, telling and place and to ask how much of our histories are taken – and who gets to tell our stories.”
Cheryl Leavy won a Queensland Writers Fellowship while Firelight from Kalkadoon writer, John Morrisey won the Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection.
Ngarindjeri, Kaurna poet, Dominic Guerrera won the David Unaipon Award for an Emerging Indigenous writer. He told NIRS winning the award meant alot.
Feature image Sharlene Allsop. Image supplied.
