Grace Yee won her first $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (VPLAs) for her debut novel in 2024

 

GRACE YEE, a Melbourne Poet, Wins The Victorian Prize for Literature ($100,000), Australia's Richest Literary Award

 

Grace Yee won her first $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (VPLAs) for her debut novel, Chinese Fish. In addition, she won the $25,000 poetry prize on Thursday night, bringing her total prize money to $125,000.

 

Yee winning is undeniably epic, being the first poet to have won the overall Australian literary award since 2014. Sharing the event that led to the publication of Chinese Fish, she revealed it was written for her—a personal endeavour with absolutely no ambition for publishing it.

 

The judges of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards critically appraise the verse novel for its style and the way it "intelligently... braids its modes and forms, its feminist vision, and its literary and conceptual sophistication."

 

Chinese Fish was published by Giramondo Publishing. The verse novel tells the story of a family that emigrated from Hong Kong to Aotearoa, New Zealand, over two decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s. It was a brilliant reflection borne out of the creative writing component of her PhD, which focuses primarily on the experience of Chinese women who settled in Aotearoa and were caught in the dilemma of the traditional Chinese family and the discrimination they struggled with in the larger society.

 

Grace Yee is an award-winning writer. Aside from the Victorian Prize for Literature, she has won the Patricia Hackett Prize and the Peter Steele Poetry Award in 2020. She equally served as a Creative Fellow at the State Library Victoria from 2019 to 2021.

 

Reflecting on her victory, Yee discloses her intention to utilize this opportunity of time and space to write.