Melissa Lucashenko is an Indigenous Australian writer of adult literary fiction and literary non-fiction, who has also written novels for teenagers. In 2013 at the Walkley Awards, she won the "Feature Writing Long (over 4000 words) Award" for her piece Sinking Below Sight: Down and Out in Brisbane and Logan. In 2019, she won the Miles Franklin Award for Too Much Lip.

Early life and education

Melissa Lucashenko was born in 1967 in Brisbane, Australia. Her heritage is Bundjalung and European (Ukrainian). She is a graduate of Griffith University (1990), with an honours degree in public policy. In 1992, she was a founding member of Sisters Inside, an organisation which supports women and girls in prison.

Writing career

She has said that when she began writing seriously "there was still a glaring hole in Australian literature", with almost no prominent Aboriginal voices and with only the University of Queensland Press and a few other small outlets publishing the work of Aboriginal writers. When asked whether she considers herself primarily a writer, or an Aboriginal writer, she writes that the question runs into semantic difficulties, because the word means different things to different people. Lucashenko's first work to be published was the novel Steam Pigs (1997), which won the Dobbie Literary Award for Australian women's fiction. It was also a short-list nominee for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards and the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 1998, she released the novel Killing Darcy, which won the Royal Blind Society's Talking Book Award for young readers (also referred to as the Aurora Prize in several secondary sources ). It was also a finalist for the 1998 Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Novel and named on the 1998 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award longlist. In 1999 her third novel, Hard Yards was published and was a finalist in both the 1999 NSW Premier's Literary Awards and the 2001 Courier-Mail Book of the Year. In 2002 her fourth novel Too Flash, written for young adults, was published. Lucashenko's fifth novel, Mullumbimby, won the prestigious Deloitte Fiction Book Award in 2013 and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing in 2014, as well as being nominated for several other awards. In 2015 it was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. She is also an accomplished essayist, winning the 2013 "Feature Writing Long (over 4000 words)" Walkley Award for Sinking below sight: Down and out in Brisbane and Logan. Speaking about this essay, Lucashenko said that she was partly informed by her studies in public policy: "...one thing I was trying to bring out in the piece was the odd mix of structural factors and just sheer luck, good and bad, that makes up people's lives. All of these women are poor because of the violence and because of intergenerational poverty, and those things can be attacked in policy and should be attacked in policy.". In September 2015, in a collaboration with Poets House in New York, a recording of six First Nations Australia Writers Network members reading their work was presented at a special event, which was recorded. The readers were Lucashenko, Jeanine Leane, Dub Leffler, Bruce Pascoe, Jared Thomas and Ellen van Neerven. Lucashenko was awarded the Copyright Agency Author Fellowship in 2016 to focus on her new novel, which was published as Too Much Lip in 2018. In early 2019, the novel was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Judges called it "...a fearless, searing and unvarnished portrait of generational trauma cut through with acerbic humour." The novel went on to win the 2019 Miles Franklin Award. In May 2019, Cenozoic Pictures optioned Too Much Lip for a screen adaptation, with Lucashenko as a co-writer and co-creator alongside Cenozoic's Veronica Gleeson.

Personal life and family

In March 2014, The Moth Radio Hour aired a recording of Lucashenko recounting the story of moving with her husband and daughter back to the Aboriginal lands in New South Wales (where her great-grandmother grew up), and subsequent divorce from her husband and mental illness of her daughter.

Nominations and awards

Novels

YA Novels

Essays

List of all essays in Griffith Review

Footnotes