Sat, 1st August, 2026; Steve MinOn; Best selling debut novel; First Name, Second Name

Macca and Paul talk to Steve MinOn; First Name, Second Name: Best selling debut novel

The journey will be long and difficult, one thousand miles. Try not to be too obvious. Stick to the backroads. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you get there.

Stephen Bolin leaves a bizarre note by his deathbed, asking his sisters to take his body back to his birthplace in Far North Queensland. When they ignore his request, Stephen’s corpse makes the nocturnal pilgrimage alone. But what is compelling him and what will he find there?

His journey, as a kind of jiangshi, takes him back through his turbulent family history: from his Chinese great-grandfather’s life on the goldfields in 1860s Queensland, to his Scottish grandparents’ migration to Australia as ten-pound Poms, and to his own coming of age and coming out in Brisbane and London.

Original and satirical, First Name Second Name follows four generations of one family through a reckoning with racial, familial and sexual identity.

Steve MinOn was an internationally awarded advertising copywriter and a restaurateur before becoming a writer of fiction and children’s picture books. He grew up in North Queensland, and he now lives on Turrbal land in Magandjin/Brisbane. Steve’s debut novel First Name Second Name (UQP 2025) won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer and was shortlisted for People’s Choice at the Queensland Literary Awards.

In 2026, it was shortlisted for the MUD Literary Award and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. He has written often about outsiders and his family’s mixed-race ancestral history, and his articles and short stories have been published in SBS Voices and various newspapers and anthologies.

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