And they've shown just how creatively they can express surprise.

"You could've knocked me over with a tampon," Melissa Lucashenko said about being told she'd won the Fiction Book Award for her comic novel Mullumbimby.

The Woodridge-based writer's fifth novel is about a middle-aged woman named Jo, who buys a piece of land to reconnect to her indigenous ancestry, only to find herself in trouble with her daughter, her tribe and a love interest.

Lucashenko said she wanted to write a larrikin voice, and felt she finally achieved the humorous style she aimed for with Jo.

"It's a reflection of the women I know, the women in my life are not tame, buttoned-down women... they like a beer and a belly laugh," she said.

The Queensland Literary Awards replaced the Premier's Literary Awards in 2012, after the latter were cut by the Newman government.

"Without Clare Booth, Stuart Glover and a small handful of other people, we would be in the embarrassing situation of being the only Australian state that doesn't value literature," Lucashenko said.

"They've done amazing work, it's just a pity they've had to do it with so little government support."

Crucially, the QLA have kept alive the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished indigenous writer, won this year by Ellen van Neerven for her work Heat and Light.

Lucashenko said being shortlisted for that same award in 1998 helped launch her career.

"It's through the David Unaipon Award that I am able to write a novel that can win a mainstream category, because I needed that development," she said.

"It's absolutely not a level playing field for Aboriginal writers... even Aboriginal literacy is still very low in a lot of areas."

Fellow Queenslander Kristina Olsson received the gong for non-fiction for Boy, Lost, a personal memoir about her mother's forced separation from her first son.

"I was gobsmacked, it was such a strong shortlist," she said.

"They're very special awards, given how hard people have had to fight to have them."

She said the recognition of so many female writers – six from Queensland – was no accident.

"Women's writing has always struggled to get the same coverage as men, to get the same space in review pages in newspapers," she said.

"I think it's just people opening their eyes and realising what we're doing, which is lots of good stuff."

Queensland Literary Award Winners 2013

• Deloitte Fiction Book Award: Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko
• University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award: Boy, Lost by Kristina Olsson
• People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year: The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton
• State Library of Queensland Poetry Collection/Judith Wright Calanthe Award: Jam Tree Gully by John Kinsella
• University of Southern Queensland History Book Award: The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights by Jane Lydon
• Australian Short Story Collection/Steele Rudd Award: Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy
• Griffith University Young Adult Book Award: A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty
• Children's Book Award: Don't Let a Spoonbill in the Kitchen! by Narelle Oliver
• Gadens Feature Film Script Award: Healing by Craig Monahan and Alison Nisselle
• Emerging Queensland Author Manuscript Award: Gap by Rebecca Jessen
• Unpublished Indigenous Writer/David Unaipon Award: Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven.