UQP titles longlisted for the 2024 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award

Congratulations to Melissa Lucashenko and Ellen van Neerven, longlisted for the 2024 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award for their respective titles, Edenglassieand Personal Score.

Fourteen books, including fiction, poetry and non-fiction, have been longlisted for the $50,000 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award in 2024. The Award is given to the best Australian book of the year that deals with any aspect of Australian life, and is open to books of any genre.

Asked to comment on writing trends this year, chair of the judging panel Dr Leigh Dale said it was an exceptional year for books by Indigenous authors. Books by renowned novelists Melissa Lucashenko and Alexis Wright have been longlisted, along with Ellen van Neerven’s Personal Score, a book about sport that weaves together history, memoir and social critique.

Judges' comments on Personal Score by Ellen van Neerven:

This is a beautifully written contemplation: memoir, history, and analysis of the country’s relation to sport, including Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous understandings of competition, play and belonging in life. Wide-ranging but always with controlled purpose, the book holds readers through a sometimes excruciating journey of shyness, experiences of racism and homophobia, committed othering, and losing and finding place.

Judges' comments on Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko:

The title is an early colonial name for Brisbane. There are two storylines: of Mulanyin and Nita, who watch as their lands are filled by white people, and Winona and Johnny, as they try to wrangle the feisty Mrs Eddie Blanket. In characteristically vivid prose, Lucashenko shows the ways that intimate relationships were, and continue to be, shaped by the violence of colonisation.

The shortlist will be announced in mid-August, with the winner’s name revealed at the annual award presentation by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies in October.