Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko and After Story by Larissa Behrendt commended in the Kate Challis RAKA Awards

We are delighted to share that Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko and After Story by Larissa Behrendt have both been awarded with commendations in the 2026 Kate Challis RAKA Awards. ⁠

⁠The Kate Challis RAKA Award celebrates Indigenous creative artists. In 2026, the award supports the best book of fiction published between 2021-2026 and written in English by an Indigenous author.⁠

⁠Of Edenglassie the award's selection committee said:

Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie is a vivid, imaginative journey across time, bringing the colonial past and contemporary Brisbane into conversation with wit, warmth, and humanity. Moving deftly between past and present, the novel transforms the historical record into something immediate and alive, revealing the continuing presence of First Nations history beneath the modern city. Richly imagined and often very funny, Edenglassie is both an inventive historical document and a compelling work of fiction.

Of After Story the award's selection committee said:

Larissa Behrendt’s After Story is a novel of collisions: between cultures, between Country and the 'mother country', and between the canon of English literature and the stories a family carries but cannot say. On a literary tour of England, the guarded and exacting Jasmine and her open, fearless mother Della move slowly towards one another, each carrying stories too painful to tell. Behrendt brings the personal and the literary into a compelling conversation, exploring how the stories we inherit, read and tell can both conceal the past and help us find a way towards it.

Congratulations to Melissa and Larissa on their commendations.