Melissa Lucashenko wins the 2024 Nib Literary Award

Congratulations to Melissa Lucashenko who has won the Waverley Council’s 2024 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, worth $40,000, for her novel Edenglassie (UQP).

Edenglassie was selected from 175 nominations and a shortlist of six books by the Nib prize judging panel: publisher Julia Carlomagno, poet Jamie Grant and author Angela Meyer.

Carlomagno says:

Edenglassie was a ‘brilliant novel’. Its prose sparks with electricity and the characters linger long in the reader’s mind,’ she said. ‘It is a book that expands understanding. It takes readers on a journey involving the heart, the mind and the eye.

On winning the prize money and what she's going to do with it, Melissa told Indigenous affairs editor of The Guardian, Lorena Allam:

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. A central tenet of traditional culture is to share when you can.

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 told Lorena Allam of The Guardian, looking back, she does not know how she managed to finish it, but the result is a novel she wanted to write for decades, stating she:

Wouldn’t change a sentence of it.

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.

Congratulations once again to Melissa Lucashenko on her remarkable achievements and well-deserved recognition.