Melbourne poet Grace Yee has won Australia’s richest literary award for her debut verse novel, Chinese Fish.
Taking home the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLAs), Yee’s win is the first time a poet has received the prize since 2014. She also won the $25,000 poetry prize on Thursday night, selected from a record 807 books entered for the prize.
Initially part of her PhD on Chinese women writers in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Yee has said the story is also inspired by Aotearoa’s Chinese community, which she grew up in.
“We were impressed by how intelligently Chinese Fish braids its modes and forms, its feminist vision, and its literary and conceptual sophistication,” the judges said of Yee’s highly regarded novel.
“Chinese Fish switches between lyric, dramatic and documentary poetic forms, to tell a multi-generational tale of the Chin family’s migration from Hong Kong to Aotearoa New Zealand. Yee focuses on women’s experience; particularly, how migration tests the relationship between a mother and her daughter.”
Currently working as a casual academic at the University of Melbourne, Yee told the ABC that she hadn’t even intended to publish the verse novel as she was writing it but eventually decided to send the manuscript to Giramondo Publishing, who accepted it.
This is the second time a piece of writing from Giramondo has won the VPLAs, as Jessica Au took home the Victorian prize for literature last year for her novel ‘Cold Enough for Snow’.
“I wrote it for myself, Yee said about ‘Chinese Fish’. “I had absolutely no ambitions for publishing it… [and when I finished my thesis, it sat in the top drawer.”
Now that she’s won the prize, Yee says the award money means she “can relax a little bit” and have more time and space to write further.
Yee’s work has appeared in Overland, Island, Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Rabbit, Cordite Poetry Review, The Shanghai Literary Review, Women’s Museum of California, Hainamana, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, and Best of Australian Poems 2021, and 2022, among others. In 2020, she was awarded the Patricia Hackett Prize, and the Peter Steele Poetry Award. Her next work to be published in 2024 with Cordite Books is a collection of poems, Light Traps: A History.
In other categories, the prize for fiction went to Melissa Lucashenko for her novel Edenglassie. Ellen van Neerven’s book, Personal Score: Sport, culture, identity received the prize for non-fiction, and the prize for Indigenous writing went to Daniel Browning for Close to the Subject: Selected Works. The people’s choice award was given to The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World by Antony Loewenstein.
The Victorian prize for literature last went to a work of poetry in 2014, when Jennifer Maiden’s Liquid Nitrogen was chosen.
Australian female poets have been blazing trails in recent times. Last year, the Queensland Premier Literary Awards went to a collection of poems– Sarah Holland-Batt’s poetry collection, The Jaguar. It was fresh off her 2023 Stella Prize win, with the previous years’ winner, Evelyn Araluen also a celebrated poet for her 2022 collection, Drop Bear.