Melbourne poet Grace Yee has won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (VPLAs) for her debut verse novel, Chinese Fish.
It is the first time a poet has won the prize, which is Australia's richest literary award, since 2014.
Yee also won the $25,000 poetry prize on Thursday night, bringing her total prize money to $125,000.
Published by Giramondo Publishing, Chinese Fish tells the multi-generational story of a family that emigrated from Hong Kong to Aotearoa New Zealand over two decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The VPLA judges praised the verse novel for the way it "intelligently … braids its modes and forms, its feminist vision, and its literary and conceptual sophistication".
Chinese Fish was borne out of the creative writing component of her PhD on the experience of settler Chinese women in Aotearoa, who she says were caught between the constraints of the traditional Chinese family and the discrimination they faced in broader society.
"They were at home performing to those patriarchal imperatives and in the mainstream putting on a different kind of performance."
Chinese Fish is told from multiple perspectives, including the two protagonists, Ping and her daughter Cherry.
Yee says the verse novel's polyphonic structure was the product of much experimentation.
"I knew from the beginning I couldn't tell the story in a singular voice," she says.
"It took a lot of playing around … before I was happy with the voices."
Yee won the Patricia Hackett Prize and the Peter Steele Poetry Award in 2020, and served as a Creative Fellow at the State Library Victoria from 2019 to 2021. But the poet never dreamed her thesis would eventually be published as a verse novel.
"I wrote it for myself," she says.
"I had absolutely no ambitions for publishing it … [and] when I finished my thesis, it sat in the top drawer."
However, she eventually sent the manuscript to Giramondo Publishing, who accepted it.
Yee, who currently works as a casual academic at the University of Melbourne, says her win will give her more time and space to write.
"It means that I can relax a little bit."
A strong night for First Nations literature
Three of the nine winners at the VPLAs were Indigenous writers — including Bundjalung and Kullilli writer and host of ABC RN's The Art Show, Daniel Browning, who won the prize for Indigenous writing for his collection of essays, Close to the Subject: Selected Works.
Mununjali writer Ellen van Neerven — an acclaimed poet who won the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Book of the Year in 2021 for their second collection, Throat — won the non-fiction prize for Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity, which is a genre-defying exploration of sport, race, gender and sexuality in Australia.
Goorie writer Melissa Lucashenko won the prize for fiction for Edenglassie, a novel of colonisation told from the perspective of First Nations people in the 1850s and 2024.
This comes off the back of winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2019 for her novel Too Much Lip.
Set in Brisbane, Edenglassie moves between the worlds of Eddie Blanket, an elderly Aboriginal woman who ends up in hospital after falling in the street, and Mulanyin, a Yugambeh man living in the Brisbane area a generation after the arrival of European colonisers.
Lucashenko wrote Edenglassie to offer "an Aboriginal counterpoint" to the conversation surrounding Brisbane's bicentenary in 2024.
"[I thought] I would like to have a book out there that puts an Aboriginal perspective on what happened when John Oxley sailed up the river and decided this wasn't the Warra, this wasn't Magandjin, this wasn't Yugerah territory, this was part of the British Crown's land, and the place was going to be called Brisbane," she told ABC RN's The Book Show.
Judges praised Edenglassie as an example of "luminescent truth-telling" in its re-evaluation of First Nations and colonial history.
Speaking to ABC Arts, Lucashenko says one of the reasons she writes is "to humanise Aboriginal people in the white imagination".
"It's one thing to read there were 60 or 100,000 people killed on the Queensland frontier, but it's a whole different thing to read a book and understand what it was like to be Mulanyin and then to understand what was done to him.
"Those are two very different intellectual processes — or one is intellectual, and one is emotional. That's why I write, to translate statistics into human beings."
First children's literature winner since 1995
Brisbane-based author and illustrator Remy Lai won the children's literature category — reintroduced in this year's awards after it was dropped in 1995 — for her graphic novel Ghost Book.
A Hunger of Thorns, a fantasy novel exploring female friendship by Melbourne writer Lili Wilkinson, took out the Young Adult prize.
Dramatists S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack shared the prize for drama for The Jungle and the Sea, a play exploring the Sri Lankan civil war and its aftermath, staged by Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney in 2022.
The prize for an unpublished manuscript went to Panajachel by Rachel Morton, a writer from south-west Victoria, while Antony Loewenstein won the People's Choice award for The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.
Full list of winners
Victorian Premier's Prize for Literature ($100,000)
Chinese Fish by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing)
Prize for Children's Literature ($25,000)
Ghost Book by Remy Lai (Allen & Unwin)
Prize for Drama ($25,000)
The Jungle and the Sea by S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack (Currency Press in association with Belvoir St Theatre)
Prize for Fiction ($25,000)
Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (University of Queensland Press)
Prize for Indigenous Writing ($25,000)
Close to the Subject: Selected Works by Daniel Browning (Magabala Books)
Prize for Non-Fiction ($25,000)
Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity by Ellen van Neerven (University of Queensland Press)
Prize for Poetry ($25,000)
Chinese Fish by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing)
Prize for Writing for Young Adults ($25,000)
A Hunger of Thorns by Lili Wilkinson (Allen & Unwin)
Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript ($15,000)
Panajachel by Rachel Morton
People's Choice Award – determined by online public votes via The Wheeler Centre website ($2000)
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World by Antony Loewenstein (Scribe Publications)