Publisher details

Author: Melissa Lucashenko
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Genre: Non Fiction
Released: 04 November, 2025
ISBN: 9780702271144

Not Quite White in the Head

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Synopsis

Melissa Lucashenko is one of our most admired and awarded novelists. She is renowned for writing about ordinary Australians and the extraordinary lives they lead.

This timely collection of essays and journalism - published together for the first time - spans two turbulent decades. With her trademark wit and wisdom, Lucashenko reflects on being caught in a siege, on the marginalised lives of prisoners and the urban poor, on Blak identity, Australian literature and on meeting her writing idol. Her non-fiction, like her novels, is deeply engaged with politics, activism, culture and social (in)justice.

Not Quite White in the Head offers unprecedented access to one of the nation's greatest writers as she invites us into the conversations that truly matter.

Reviews

Striking and Searing: Read an Extract from Not Quite White in the Head by Melissa Lucashenko

Review

Review | Extract

4 November 2025

Striking and Searing: Read an Extract from Not Quite White in the Head by Melissa Lucashenko

An Eye-Opening Masterpiece: Read Our Review of Not Quite White in the Head by Melissa Lucashenko

Review

Review | Our Review

3 November 2025

An Eye-Opening Masterpiece: Read Our Review of Not Quite White in the Head by Melissa Lucashenko

About the author

Melissa Lucashenko

Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. She has been publishing books with UQP since 1997, with her first novel, Steam Pigs, winning the Dobbie Literary Award and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Hard Yards (1999) was shortlisted for the Courier-Mail Book of the Year and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and Mullumbimby (2013) won the Queensland Literary Award and was longlisted for the Stella Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Kibble Literary Award. She has also written two novels for teenagers, Killing Darcy (UQP, 1998) and Too Flash (IAD Press, 2002). In 2013 Melissa won the inaugural long-form Walkley Award for her Griffith REVIEW essay ‘Sinking Below Sight: Down and Out in Brisbane and Logan’.