It’s rare to have eight pages of illustrations in a book of poetry, but there aren’t many collections like Chinese Fish, which on Thursday won Australia’s most generous writing prize – the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature awarded by the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLA). Its author, Grace Yee, also won the VPLA poetry prize, worth another $25,000.

Chinese Fish is a multi-voice, multi-decade saga that focuses on the Chin family – Ping, who is married to Stan; their daughter Cherry; and some of Cherry’s siblings – running a fish and chip shop in New Zealand from the 1960s. The judges said they were “impressed by how intelligently Chinese Fish braids its modes and forms, its feminist vision, and its literary and conceptual sophistication”. Yee said she was overwhelmed to win.

Yee’s family migrated from China to New Zealand in the late 19th century, but their long-term presence counted for little when she encountered incidents of anti-Chinese racism growing up.

“I remember bringing it up with my parents and their response was just to shrug and say, ‘What can you do?’ This is several generations of not dealing with it. Just living with it.”

Other prize winners were Melissa Lucashenko for fiction (Edenglassie); Ellen van Neerven for non-fiction (Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity); Remy Lai for children’s literature (Ghost Book); S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack for drama (The Jungle and The Sea); Daniel Browning for Indigenous writing (Close to the Subject: Selected Works); Lili Wilkinson for writing for young adults (A Hunger of Thorns); Rachel Morton for unpublished manuscript (Panajachel); and Anthony Loewenstein for people’s choice (The Palestine Laboratory).

Chinese Fish was originally the creative element of Yee’s PhD focusing on Chinese women settlers in New Zealand. But when it was finished, she filed the poems away for a few years before deciding to rework them.

While much of the work is from the perspectives of Ping and Cherry, and what Yee refers to as “the orientalist voice”, she also brings in material from old newspapers, more illustrations, Cantonese-Taishanese vocabulary, and a scholarly voice that references the Sinophobic legislation that existed at the time in New Zealand. Her next book, Light Traps: A History, is about Chinese settlers in Australia.

When Melissa Lucashenko won the Miles Franklin in 2019 for her previous novel, Too Much Lip, she said she was next going to write her “big book”. Edenglassie incorporates a 19th-century story set in Meanjin, before the Indigenous population was overwhelmed by settlers, with a contemporary story set in those lands known as Brisbane. Lucashenko said she had been doing research for it on and off since the early 1990s, when she read Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland.