Melissa Lucashenko

• Name — Melissa Lucashenko • Born — 1967 • Birthplace — Brisbane, Queensland, Australia • Occupation — Writer • Notable Works — Too Much Lip • Awards — Miles Franklin Award (2019)

Melissa Lucashenko was born in 1967 in Brisbane, Australia. She is of Bundjalung and Ukrainian heritage. She graduated from Griffith University in 1990 with a degree in public policy. In 1992, she was a founding member of Sisters Inside, an organisation that supports women and girls in prison.

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 very few outlets publishing the work of Aboriginal writers.

Lucashenko's first work to be published was the novel Steam Pigs (1997), which won the Dobbie Literary Award for debut Australian women writers. It was also shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (South East Asia and South Pacific). 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). It was also a finalist for the 1998 Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Novel and longlisted for the 1998 James Tiptree Award. In 1999 her third novel, Hard Yards, was published. It was a finalist for the 1999 NSW Premier's Literary Awards and the 2001 Courier-Mail Book of the Year Award. In 2002 her fourth novel Too Flash, written for young adults, was published.

Lucashenko's fifth novel, Mullumbimby, won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction Book 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 Dublin Literary Award. In 2019 her sixth novel Too Much Lip won the Miles Franklin Award and Queensland Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance. The novel was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Judges called it "a fearless, searing and unvarnished portrait of generational trauma cut through with acerbic humour." Cenozoic Pictures optioned Too Much Lip for a screen adaptation, with Lucashenko as a co-writer and co-creator alongside Cenozoic's Veronica Gleeson. Her seventh novel, Edenglassie, was released in 2023 and won the Queensland Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance for the second time, as well as the Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction. In late 2024, it won the ARA Historical Novel Prize, being commended for capturing "the brutal realities of colonisation while celebrating the resilience of Indigenous cultures."

Lucashenko is also an essayist, winning the 2013 Long Feature Writing 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.

Lucashenko moved with her husband and daughter back to the Aboriginal lands in New South Wales where her great-grandmother said she was from. She subsequently divorced from her husband. She has spoken publicly about her daughter's mental illness.

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