The Stella Prize
Subcategory of Awards Australian Awards
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History

The Stella Prize is named after Stella Maria 'Miles' Franklin, and was first awarded in 2013. It is a prize for women authors (cis, trans, and non-binary inclusive) of fiction or nonfiction, and was developed in response to the under-representation of women as literary award winners.

In 2021, the organisation announced that from 2022, the prize would also be open to single-author poetry collections in addition to fiction and non-fiction.

In December 2021, philanthropist Paula McLean made a $1 million donation to the Stella Prize's Forever Fund, which aims to secure the prize for perpetuity.

Note:

Also longlisted in 2015 was Christine Kenneally's The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures (which, as science writing, falls outside AustLit's scope).

Notes

  • 'The Stella Prize will be an annual literary prize for Australian women's writing. It will raise the profile of women's writing, and will reward one writer with a $50,000 prize. The shortlisted and winning books will be widely publicised and marketed in order to bring readers to the work of Australian women writers.'

    Organisers of the award expect to announce full details in 2012, with the first award being offered in 2013.

    Source: The Stella Prize website, http://thestellaprize.com.au/
    Sighted: 19/09/2011

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2024

winner y separately published work icon Praiseworthy Alexis Wright , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 25896114 2023 single work novel

'The new novel from the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Australian author Alexis Wright, in a limited edition hardcover.

'Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2023

Also shortlisted: Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (Louisa Lim).
winner y separately published work icon The Jaguar Sarah Holland-Batt , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2022 23603765 2022 selected work poetry

'A stunning new collection from one of Australia's finest poets - her most impressive work yet.

'With electrifying boldness and fearlessness of vision, Sarah Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father's Parkinson's Disease, and a daughter forged by grief.

'Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and compulsively probing the body's animal endurance and appetites, along with the metamorphoses of long illness, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt's distinctive lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.

'In this collection Holland-Batt is at her most exacting and uncompromising- these ferociously intelligent, insistent poems refuse to look away, and challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. The Jaguar is a devastating and mesmerising collection by a poet at the height of her powers.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2022

winner y separately published work icon Dropbear Evelyn Araluen , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2021 20534089 2021 selected work poetry essay

'I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.

'This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2021

winner y separately published work icon The Bass Rock Evie Wyld , Sydney : Vintage Australia , 2020 17537370 2020 single work novel historical fiction

'In 1720s Scotland, a priest and his son get lost in the forest, transporting a witch to the coast to stop her from being killed by the village.

'In the sad, slow years after the Second World War, Ruth finds herself the replacement wife to a recent widower and stepmother to his two young boys, installed in a huge house by the sea and haunted by those who have come before.

'Fifty years later, Viv is cataloguing the valuables left in her dead grandmother's seaside home, when she uncovers long-held secrets of the great house.

'Three women, hundreds of years apart, slip into each other's lives in a novel of darkness, violence and madness.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2020

winner y separately published work icon See What You Made Me Do Jess Hill , Melbourne : Black Inc. , 2019 18640451 2019 multi chapter work criticism

'Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the wrong question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it?

'Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators – and the systems that enable them – in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience – abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence – not in generations to come, but today.

'Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do radically rethinks how to confront the national crisis of fear and abuse in our homes.' (Publication summary)

Works About this Award

Praiseworthy Makes History: Alexis Wright Is the First Author to Win the Miles Franklin and the Stella Prize for One Book Astrid Edwards , 2024 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 1 August 2024; InReview , July 2024;

'Waanyi writer Alexis Wright and her magnum opus Praiseworthy have made history by winning this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award. She’s now the first writer to win the Miles Franklin and The Stella Prize (both national literary prizes) for the same work.'

Alexis Wins Award with Her Novel Praiseworthy Liina Flynn , 2024 single work column
— Appears in: Koori Mail , 19 June no. 828 2024; (p. 21)
'Winning the Stella Prize, not once, but twice is no mean feat. But that's what Waanyi writer Alexis Wright has done - this year with her book Praiseworthy. Her first Stella Prize was won in 2018 with her collective memoir of Leigh Bruce 'Tracker' Tilmoth.' (Introduction)
Alexis Wright on Winning the 2024 Stella Prize! Suzy Garcia (interviewer), 2024 single work interview
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , May 2024;

'Alexis Wright is the winner of the 2024 Stella Prize, making history as the first writer to win twice. In this interview, she speaks to Kill Your Darlings about her winning novel, Praiseworthy, why she writes big books with big ideas and how her publisher stopped her from putting down her pen for good.'  (Introduction)

‘Perhaps the Great Australian Novel’ : Alexis Wright Wins Stella Prize for Second Time with Praiseworthy Kelly Burke , 2024 single work column
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 2 May 2024;

'The 73-year-old has won the $60,000 prize for Australian female and non-binary writers for her ‘genre-bending’ 736-page novel' 

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