BIO
Lech Blaine is an award-winning writer from regional Queensland who was born in 1992. He was the 2023 Charles Perkins Centre writer in residence. His second book, Australian Gospel, will be published in November 2024.
Lech is author of the critically-acclaimed Car Crash: A Memoir. Car Crash was shortlisted for the National Biography Award and two categories at the Queensland Literary Awards. In October 2022, Car Crash was published in North America and the United Kingdom by Greystone Books.
Lech is also the author of two Quarterly Essays: Top Blokes and Bad Cop.
Lech’s work has been published by Best Australian Essays, Good Weekend, Kill Your Darlings, The Griffith Review, The Guardian and The Monthly. He was an inaugural recipient of a Griffith Review Queensland Writers Fellowship. In 2017, he won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. In 2019, he was awarded a Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Emerging Artist Fellowship.
Lech Blaine 
Hi Lech, I just want to say that I really enjoy your writing. I stumbled across your works via twitter (Chris Murphy), so who said social media delivers nothing!
Keep writing, you are bloody good!
Hey Lech,
I just read your story in The Lifted Brow. I enjoyed it a lot. I love your writing style. Look forward to reading more.
Happy new year!
Robyn
Listening to you on conversations! Wow what an interesting life! Read another price online keep up the great writing!!
Just listened to conversations also & wow, what an eventful life so far. I now look forward to reading your publications. Happiness to all.
Lech it was great listening to you on ABC Conversations today. You have a great gift of story telling.
I was enthralled. I look forward to reading your works but would much rather get the audio with you narrating.
Wishing you all the best for your future xx
I just listened to you on Conversations-you are a wonderful storyteller. I so look forward to reading your book! All the best.
You write good, young man!
I have just finished “Hillsong’s strange tides”. Well researched and well written. Thanks.
I don’t think I’ve ever Googled a magazine writer before, but felt compelled to after reading your Hillsong piece in The Monthly and remembering your name from last year’s article on how Queenslanders voted in the general election.
The Hillsong piece was masterful. The writing was non-judgemental, but the facts – as you so artfully arranged them – less so.
Please keep doing exactly what you’re doing!
HI Mate, listened to you on “Conversations”. So clear and articulate. Came away with alot to think about. Thanks
HI Lech, I just listened to your conversation with Richard Fidler this morning and I enjoyed it very much and glad you are in the world. Thanks
Hi Lech, just finished car crash after hearing you on Betooda. Was a really nice read especially for a young Australian male and even had me in tears. Cheers.
I heard about your book on BBC’s outlook; reading it now…I’ll check in when I finish it…great writer, lad
[…] challenging at the best of times. However, after months of nail biting, one of Australia’s most famed authors is trying to provide valuable insights as to what makes Dutton tick. In doing so, Blaine attempts […]
Hi Lech…just read your great article in The Age on Mary and Michael Shelley.
Wow…my parents had their own slight encounter with Michael and Mary around 25 years ago. My parents were pastors of a small church in a country town, with their home phone number on the church sign. M&M rang them asking to stay the night.
My parents had never met M&M and knew nothing about them. Nevertheless, they took them in, gave them dinner, made up a bed, and loaned them pyjamas. In the middle of the night my parents heard a disturbance. M&M had moved around furniture and taken all the food out of the freezer, screaming that it should be for the hungry. Dad told them to leave.
Over the next few weeks I received several abusive letters from M&M about the place of women in society (trousers are of the devil, etc). Mind you, I had never met M&M, and was living 2 states away from my parents. M&M only knew about me from my parents mentioning to them in passing that they had a daughter named X working at Y university. M&M presumably got my address from the phone book.
The final insult…the letters were decorated with cut-out pictures of roses from a book M&M had stolen from my parents’ house.
My parents took their phone number off the church sign after that.
Kudos to you and your family Lech. Thank you for sharing, and really looking forward to reading your new book!
Lech congratulations on winning the Age Book of the Year for Australian Gospel. Absolutely 100% deserved. It is a terrific book. Your excruciating clarity of the Shelleys’ venal narcissism as juxtaposed with Tom and Lenore’s open-hearted love makes the book ageless, and deeply profound, worthy of comparison with Homer, except your story is not imagined. Your lyrical melliflous prose in the Australian vernacular is a treasure: don’t lose it as you continue to rise on the world stage.
PS I saw somewhere that you were researching motel-owning in Bundaberg. I have a mate whom you should talk to. Get in touch if you want to.