“I’ve made more money from writing in the past two days than I have in the past three decades,” says Melissa Lucashenko, having just learned she has won one of the richest literary prizes in Australia on Wednesday – just 24 hours after collecting another prize for her latest novel, Edenglassie.
Lucashenko has won $150,000 in prize money for Edenglassie since Tuesday, her two latest wins bringing the total number of awards her sixth novel has won to seven.
It is an extraordinary run for the First Nations writer of Goorie and European heritage. On Wednesday night, she was announced as the winner of the ARA Historical Novel Society Australasia’s $100,000 adult novel prize – a day after it was announced she had won 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.
Hailed as a “fiercely original exploration of Australia’s past and its enduring consequences”, the Historical Novel Society judges described Edenglassie, which stretches across 19th century colonialism and contemporary Indigenous existence, as “an ambitious, epic novel that cracks what the author calls the ‘racist myth-making’ that has painted Aboriginal people so negatively”.
“Written with the wit, heart and intelligence that define Lucashenko’s work and here amount to virtuoso storytelling, Edenglassie [is] a timely work that enriches the landscape of historical fiction,” the judges said in their joint statement.
Lucashenko told Guardian Australia on Wednesday that Edenglassie had been her “passion project” for the past four years.
“It’s the book I had wanted to write for decades,” she said. “And I’m actually really happy with the way it’s turned out. For the first time ever, I’ve written a book that I wouldn’t change a sentence of. So I guess that’s testament to four years of very hard yakka.”
She began writing the novel in 2019, and continued to write during tumultuous times – the Covid-19 pandemic, bushfires, the Queensland floods that almost claimed the life of her daughter, and the voice referendum – with the latter raising many of the same issues that drove Lucashenko to start writing Edenglassie.
“It is the need for a reckoning, and the need for people to actually know where Australia has come from,” she said. “We didn’t land here in 2024 free of history … The backstory of the nation was what I was trying to illuminate.”
The Historical Novel Society Australasia awards recognise the outstanding literary talents of novelists who “illuminate stories of the past, providing a window into our present and the future”.
Beverley McWilliams was named winner of the $30,000 children and young adult category for Spies in the Sky, a novel inspired by the true history of pigeons who went to war.
The four shortlisted finalists in both categories also received $5,000 each.
Both prizes are open to novels where most of the narrative takes place at least 50 years ago.
This year the Historical Novel Society Australasia awards’ patron, the ARA Group, doubled the prize pool to $150,000. The company’s founder, executive chair and managing director, Edward Federman said he believed historical fiction had not always received the attention the genre rightly deserved.
“Our hope is that the ARA Historical Novel prize will not only make a considerable difference to the lives of this year’s winning authors, but also shine a light on the historical fiction genre and the work of all entrants across Australia and New Zealand,” he said.
