Melissa Lucashenko’s historical novel Edenglassie, about the colonisation of Magandjin/Meanjin/Brisbane, has won the highest accolade at the Queensland literary awards, with the judges praising it as a work that “elevates our understanding of Queensland’s soul”.
It’s the second time Lucashenko has taken out the $30,000 premier’s award for “a work of state significance”, previously winning for her 2018 novel Too Much Lip, which also won the Miles Franklin.
It consolidates a string of accolades for Edenglassie, which won fiction prizes at this year’s Victorian premier’s literary awards and the Indie Book awards, and was longlisted for both the Stella prize and the Miles Franklin.
Winning the prize has a particular resonance for the Goorie author, however: “A book like Edenglassie could never have won an award of state significance in Queensland up until the last decade or two,” she told Guardian Australia.
“I think it shows that Queensland is a radically different place, in lots of ways, to when I was growing up, and that the efforts of good people to change the narrative and to fight back against reactionary forces has made a difference.”
Taking its title from the penal colony’s original name (an amalgamation of Edinburgh and Glasgow), Lucashenko’s novel intertwines storylines set in the 1840s and 1850s and the present day, showing the impact of colonisation through the experiences of two sets of characters.
The judges described it as a novel that “bridges centuries with compelling characters and immersive detail, forging a narrative that not only evokes the complexities of history but also profoundly reimagines Australia’s collective memory”.
At the centre of the novel is a shocking but little known episode from 1855: the brutal hanging of the Yagara leader and resistance fighter Dundalli in the town’s centre, which Lucashenko read about in the diaries of the Scottish settler Thomas Petrie, a “trove of first-hand information” that she first encountered two decades ago.
“There’s these kind of singular images that just seared themselves into my brain at the time, and they never left me,” she says. “That’s how you know you’ve got something to go on, as a writer.”
Lucashenko’s win headlines a strong year for First Nations writers, who were awarded five of the Queensland literary award’s 15 prizes and fellowships, including the $15,000 fiction prize, won by Sharlene Allsopp for her debut novel The Great Undoing and the $15,000 short story prize, won by the Kalkadoon writer John Morrissey for his debut short story collection Firelight.
Also awarded were the Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna poet Dominic Guerrera, who won the prize for an unpublished manuscript by an emerging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writer, for his collection Native Rage; and the Kooma and Nguri writer Cheryl Levy, who won one of three $20,000 Queensland Writers fellowships for her poetry and essay project Mudhunda – Song Country.
Appraising this year’s winners across 12 categories, the state librarian, Vicki McDonald, said they “remind us how the very best writing actively examines the complexities of the human condition”.
Among these were Abbas El-Zein’s Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars, unanimously awarded the nonfiction prize. A literary memoir drawing on the author’s youth in wartorn Lebanon in the 1970s, the book was praised by judges as a work that “evokes extreme experiences with a touch that is illuminating and poetic”.
The People’s Choice’s winner was Carly-Jay Metcalf’s Breath, an account of the Brisbane writer’s experiences living with cystic fibrosis that judges said “weaves a triumphant tale of indomitable spirit”.
This year an increased total of $276,000 prize money was awarded, up from $238,500 in 2023.
