Richard Neville, the chair of the Miles Franklin judging panel and Mitchell librarian at State Library of NSW, calls Too Much Lip “a (sometimes) fabulous tale” woven together with “the very real politics of cultural survival” and “a story of hope and redemption for all Australians”.CONGRATULATIONS! Melissa Lucashenko for winning the Miles Franklin Award for 2019 with ‘Too Much Lip’.īY an amazing coincidence we just happen to have Melissa reading from her novel and an interview in which she modestly declares she didn’t expect ‘Too Much Lip’ to be noticed in literary awards as it was too full on!

It fills you with rage to be poor in a rich country and I think that’s perfectly legitimate. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, a couple of times each. It behooves those of us who are fed to keep that in the front of our minds. “The Russians have a saying: the fed don’t understand the hungry. “There’s Asian poor, there’s African poor people, Pacific poor and there’s of course refugee and immigrant poor.” “Yes there’s a white underclass in Australia, but there’s an Aboriginal underclass that dwarfs it,” she says. She says she doesn’t agree with the way public discourse since then has reduced discussion of the working class to one of predominantly white men. Lucashenko started writing Too Much Lip before Donald Trump was elected president of the US. She doesn’t plan to stay, but then her family – and her country – start to envelop her. The novel follows Kerry Salter as she careens into her rural New South Wales home town on a stolen motorbike to see her grandfather before he dies. Too Much Lip was also shortlisted for the 2019 Stella prize. “When they told me, it felt as if I hadn’t even been on the shortlist, I was that shocked.” She had previously been longlisted for the Miles Franklin for her novel Mullimbimby in 2014. “It’s a big deal,” Lucashenko says of her win. The Miles Franklin was first awarded in 1957 and named for the Australian writer and author of My Brilliant Career, Stella “Miles” Franklin. Too Much Lip, published by University of Queensland Press, was selected from a shortlist including works from the past winner Rodney Hall and a three-time nominee, Gail Jones, alongside Michael Mohammed Ahmed, Jennifer Mills and Gregory Day. The $60,000 prize was awarded in Sydney on Tuesday night and recognises the novel of “the highest literary merit” that focuses on a phase of Australian life.

Too much lip novel