Edenglassie and Sunbirds shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award
A huge congratulations to Melissa Lucashenko and Mirandi Riwoe for their 2024 Barbara Jefferis Award shortlistings for their respective novels, Edenglassieand Sunbirds.
The Barbara Jefferis Award is offered biennially for “the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”.
Barbara Jefferis was a feminist, a founding member of the Australian Society of Authors, its first woman President and, in the words of Thomas Keneally, “a rare being amongst authors, being both a fine writer but also organisationally gifted. She was a professional and internationally published writer long before most of us dreamed of such things”.
The judges were impressed by the exceptionally high quality of the titles under consideration for this years’ Award, saying,
“The many entries to this year’s prize reflected a healthy diversity of genre, form, settings and narratives. Common to many were themes of migration and exile, resilience and recovery from trauma, social isolation and renewed connection, thwarted ambition, and violence against bodies and minds. The representations of women and girls were varied and often original. We would welcome more expansive representations of gender diversity. The judges noticed and were encouraged by the many authors who sought to offer new perspectives of, or who wrote against past erasure in Australian history, or who embraced and celebrated complexity, resilience, and community. In our reflections, we noticed that few writers focused on the future, and we wondered whether this revealed a wider desire for, and interest in, historical reckoning for this country.
“We found all six books deeply affecting, and many highly memorable for their unswerving demands for social justice and reclamations of power. We would like to extend our congratulations to their authors.”
Women & Children by Tony Birch was also highly commended.
Judges' comments for Edenglassie
Clever, satirical and deeply political, Edenglassie is at once an Aboriginal love story, a takedown of colonial structures, and a guide to decolonising our present. Moving back and forth between Magandjin (Brisbane) one generation after colonisation in the early nineteenth century, and the present day, Edenglassie follows the stories of Yugambeh man Mulanyin as he falls in love with Nita, a Ngugi woman ‘taken in’ by the white Petrie family, and nonagenarian Yagara woman Eddie Blanket who, hospitalised after a fall, suddenly receives much publicity as ‘Queensland’s oldest Aboriginal’. In the to and fro between the timelines, Lucashenko removes any sense of historicity – all is immediate, the past not at all dislocated from the present – and such dissolution of temporal boundaries emphasises that the violence of the 1800s continues, as does the sovereignty of First Nations peoples. Lucashenko’s gifts as a writer are abundant in Edenglassie. There is great humour and joy here, a cracking pace, compelling characters, and no shyness in speaking truth.
Judges' comments for Sunbirds
In Sunbirds, Mirandi Riwoe transports the reader into a time and place not often explored by Australian writers. Set in the 1940s in what was then West Java, Sunbirds follows the stories of Anna van Hoorn, the daughter of Dutch tea plantation family, and Diah, the family’s housekeeper. When a local woman, Fientje, is murdered by a Dutchman, and the broader threat of Japanese invasion and world war looms over the van Hoorns and those who serve them, differences of gender, class, and racialised status gradually become visible, then brutal. In vibrant, sensuous prose, Riwoe captures the struggle for selfhood and nationhood under colonial rule with an attention to detail that is utterly enthralling. Sunbirds is at once a gripping wartime romance and a powerful story about survival and the struggle for independence.
The award winner will be announced at an in-person ceremony in mid-November.
Congratulations again to Melissa and Mirandi.