Lucashenko wins 2024 Nib Literary Award

Melissa Lucashenko has won the Waverley Council’s 2024 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, worth $40,000, for her novel Edenglassie (UQP).

The judging panel, comprising publisher Julia Carlomagno, poet Jamie Grant, and author and educator Angela Meyer, chose Edenglassie from a shortlist of six books.

Carlomagno said Edenglassie was a ‘brilliant novel’. ‘Its prose sparks with electricity and the characters linger long in the reader’s mind,’ she said. ‘It is a book that expands understanding. It takes readers on a journey involving the heart, the mind and the eye.’

Carlomagno congratulated Lucashenko ‘and all the finalists for this year’s award’.

An acclaimed Aboriginal writer of Goorie and European heritage, Lucashenko has been widely published as novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her recent work has appeared in The Moth: Fifty True Stories, Meanjin, Griffith Review, and the Monthly.

Singer-songwriter Deborah Conway won the $4000 Nib People’s Choice Prize for her memoir, Book of Life (A&U).

Each shortlisted author, including Lucashenko and Conway, take home the $1500 Alex Buzo Shortlist Prize.

Presented by Sydney’s Waverley Council, the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award celebrates ‘the very best of Australian research-based literature’. Waverley Council said that since the award’s inception in 2002, ‘a total of $540,000 in prize money has been presented directly to authors with nominations judged on literary merit, research, readability, and value to the community’.

Last year’s winner was Alison Bashford for the book An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family (Allen Lane).

Pictured: Melissa Lucashenko. Picture credit: Glenn Hunt.

Category: Awards Local news