Melissa Lucashenko

Melissa Lucashenko is an Australian author of Goorie (Bundjalung) and European heritage whose novel Too Much Lip (2018) won the Miles Franklin Award. She is one of Australia's most prominent Indigenous authors and has been a vocal activist for Indigenous rights and culture. Too Much Lip is a novel about Kerry Salter, a queer Bundjalung woman who returns to her family as they face the threatened demolition of their ancestral land by a developer backed by local government. The novel is earthy, funny, and politically fierce, with an unsparing depiction of the effects of colonisation on Indigenous families. Lucashenko has also written Mullumbimby (2013), Steam Pigs (1997), and other works. She was awarded the Queensland Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance in 2019. She is based in south-east Queensland.