The Bundjalung writer Melissa Lucashenko’s extraordinary run of literary prize wins for her latest novel Edenglassie continues, winning yet another accolade on Wednesday evening: the $40,000 Mark and Evette Moran Nib prize.
Edenglassie, a sweeping historical novel named after the penal colony that became Brisbane, has now earned close to the $200,000 mark before tax.
“I’m a socialist, I don’t mind paying tax,” the author added. “I just wish it would all go to housing and hospitals, not bloody Aukus. And somebody has to pay the billionaires’ tax bill.”
But Lucashenko has given away a substantial amount of her prize money, which she says honours her own cultural obligations.
“Part of all my prize money over the years has gone to people in desperate need, usually in my family, but not always. You’re not much of a Blackfella if you have a roof over your head and food in the fridge and people close to you don’t,” she said.
“A central tenet of traditional culture is to share when you can.”
Edenglassie was selected from 175 nominations by the Nib prize judging panel: the publisher Julia Carlomagno, poet Jamie Grant and author Angela Meyer.
“Its prose sparks with electricity and the characters linger long in the reader’s mind,” the judges said. “It is a book that expands understanding. It takes readers on a journey involving the heart, the mind and the eye.”
Edenglassie begins in the 19th century when Aboriginal people still outnumbered the colonisers, and stretches forward in time, connecting the horrors of invasion to its ongoing effects on contemporary Aboriginal lives. It explores how people try to live with the trauma that history has delivered them, and their love for country.
Lucashenko began writing the novel in 2019, and kept writing through Covid lockdowns, catastrophic bushfires, the Queensland floods and the deeply acrimonious voice referendum. She has said, looking back, she does not know how she managed to finish it, but the result is a novel she wanted to write for decades and “wouldn’t change a sentence of”.
Edenglassie has had an incredible run. In October, it won the ARA Historical Novel Society Australasia’s $100,000 adult novel prize – a day after winning the $50,000 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary award. This is on top of five previous awards, including the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary award for fiction and the 2024 Queensland Premier’s award for a work of state significance.
She praised the stance taken by fellow author Richard Flanagan who recently refused the UK’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for his book Question 7, saying he would not accept the £50,000 prize until the award’s sponsor reduces its investment in fossil fuels.
“He was very strong on that. And I’ll give him full props for doing that. But at the same time, not many white writers have got an extremely impoverished community around them and reliant on them. There wouldn’t be a week go by when your average Aboriginal writer doesn’t need to put their hand in their pocket,” she said.
“I’m very, very grateful for the prizes,” she added. “We need to eat, and we need to buy the continent back!
“My mother’s favourite saying was, ‘if you want something done, do it yourself.’ So until such time as we’ve got treaty and our situation is changed through reparations, I’ve got to just keep ploughing every cent I can into housing and buying back land and providing resources.
“I start with my immediate family and work outwards. My kids are housed. My siblings will all be housed by the end of the year. I’ve helped a single parent with a house deposit from previous years’ prizes,” she said.
“There was a Bundjalung elder who’s passed now, and she said, if everyone just looked after their family and did a little bit more, our people would be right. And I took that on board 25 years ago, and I think that’s a good approach. If you look after your family and then just do a bit more.
“There’s a Russian proverb: the fed don’t understand the hungry. I’m fed, but I do remember the hungry days.”
Lucashenko’s next novel is, incredibly, a crime comedy set in the New South Wales coastal town of Ocean Shores, titled Blood on the Tiles.
“It’s set in a Scrabble club. I told these old ladies in a Scrabble club I was in 20 years ago that I would write a book about a Scrabble club. So I’m finally doing it,” she laughs.
“I don’t expect to win any prizes with this one, but it’s something that I feel like I need to write.”
Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko is published by UQP
