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.[1]
In 1992, she was a founding member of
Sisters Inside, an organisation which supports women and girls in prison.[5][6]
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.[7] 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.[7]
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.
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.".[13]
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.[15] In early 2019, the novel was shortlisted for the
Stella Prize.[16][17][18] Judges called it "...a fearless, searing and unvarnished portrait of generational trauma cut through with acerbic humour."[5] The novel went on to win the 2019 Miles Franklin Award.[19] 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.[20]
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.[21]
"Not quite white in the head" in Griffith Review edition 2 (2004)[44]
"Our bodies" in Making Perfect Bodies, Griffith Review, edition 4 (2005)[45]
"Globalisation, Kimberley style" in Griffith Review, edition 6 (2005)[46]
"How green is my valley?" in Griffith Review, edition 12 (2007)[47]
"On the same page, right?" in Griffith Review, edition 26 (2009)[48]
"The silent majority" in Stories for Today, edition 26 (2009)[49]
"Sinking below sight" in Griffith Review, edition 41 (2013) (Winner of a 2013 Walkley Award and 2014 George Munster Award for Independent Journalism)[50]
"History's footnote, or, a Wolvi incident", pp. 63–69, in: Destroying the Joint: Why women have to change the world, edited by
Jane Caro, (UQP, 2013)[51]