BRISBANE, September 5, 2024: Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, a novel that “elevates our understanding of Queensland’s soul”, has taken out the top prize at the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards announced tonight.
Lucashenko’s epic novel of Aboriginal lives five generations apart has won the $30,000 Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance.
This is the second time Lucashenko has won the award, with her novel Too Much Lip taking out the prize in 2019.
Edenglassie was described by the judges as an “historical tapestry that tears down barriers between past and present.”
“Her deft storytelling bridges centuries with compelling characters and immersive detail, forging a narrative that not only evokes the complexities of history but also profoundly reimagines Australia’s collective memory.”
An increased total of $276,000 in prize money was awarded across 12 categories including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and published and unpublished work, up from $238,500 in 2023.
Re-mapping history through First Nations perspectives also plays a central part in Sharlene Allsopp’s debut novel The Great Undoing, winner of The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, with a prize of $15,000.
The judges called Allsopp’s book “an anti-colonial collage” that “disrupts readers’ understandings of time, telling and place to ask how much of our histories are taken – and who gets to tell our stories.”
2024 is the 10th anniversary of State Library of Queensland managing the awards, in collaboration with sponsors, industry partners and the writing community.
