Too Much Lip has been named winner of this year’s Miles Franklin prize,Australia’s most significant literary award. Lucashenko,only the third Indigenous writer to win after Kim Scott and Alexis Wright,receives $60,000. The judges said she"weaves a (sometimes) fabulous tale with the very real politics of cultural survival to offer a story of hope and redemption for all Australians".
Herbook was chosen from a shortlist that also includedThe Lebs,Michael Mohammed Ahmad;A Sand Archive,Gregory Day;A Stolen Season,Rodney Hall;The Death of Noah Glass,Gail Jones;andDyschronia,Jennifer Mills.
InToo Much Lip,Kerry,whose girlfriend has been sent down for a five-year stretch in a Brisbane jail,returns to her hometown of Durrongo in northern NSW to say farewell her dying grandfather.
There she finds the family’s sacred ground,the river island where her antecedents are buried,likely to be grabbed by the corrupt mayor to become the site for a new prison,and her family dysfunctional and at loggerheads with each other.
I discovered I was writing far closer to home than I realised.
Melissa Lucashenko
As if matters couldn’t get more complicated,the outspoken Kerry – she with"too much lip"– gets involved with a white man.
Lucashenko said she was able to writeToo Much Lip only now that she was in her 50s because she had to have the confidence from a cultural point of view to say what she wanted to.