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.[6][7]
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.[8] 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.[8]
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.
In 2019 her sixth novel Too Much Lip won the Miles Franklin Award[14] and Queensland Premier's Award. The novel was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize.[15][16][17] Judges called it "...a fearless, searing and unvarnished portrait of generational trauma cut through with acerbic humour."[6] Cenozoic Pictures optioned Too Much Lip for a screen adaptation, with Lucashenko as a co-writer and co-creator alongside Cenozoic's Veronica Gleeson.[18]
Lucashenko 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.".[22]
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.[23]
—— (2013). "History's Footnote, or, a Wolvi Incident". In Jane Caro (ed.). Destroying the Joint: Why Women Have to Change the World. University of Queensland Press. ISBN9780702249907.
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