Christina Stead Prize for Fiction (1979-)
Subcategory of New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
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Notes

  • Awarded to a published work of fiction (a novel or a collection of short stories).

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2024

winner y separately published work icon The Sitter Angela O'Keeffe , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2023 26234061 2023 single work novel

'Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, subject to the gaze of others, increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?

'Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2023

Initially shortlisted: Grimmish by Michael Winkler. Withdrawn by the publisher the following day as its initial self-publication made it ineligible for the award.
winner y separately published work icon Women I Know Katerina Gibson , Cammeray : Simon and Schuster Australia , 2022 24433693 2022 selected work short story

'Unpicking the stitches of gender and genre, the stories in this searing, funny, haunting debut explore how our ideas of womanhood shape us, and what they cost us.

'‘My God darling – the women I know.’

'A young woman tries to cheat her algorithm, creating a wholesome online persona while her ‘real’ life dissipates. A grandmother speaks to her granddaughter through the fog of generations. Two lovers divide over alternative meat options. A factory worker fits eyes in companion dolls until she is called on to install her own.

'The women I know are sharp, absurd, sly, wrong, wry, repressed, hungry, horny, bold, envious, dominating, uncertain, overdetermined, underpaid, bored, smart, crystalizing, themselves.

'A burning talent with growing international recognition, Katerina Gibson’s work has appeared in GrantaKill Your DarlingsOverland and elsewhere. She is the Pacific regional winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and recipient of the Felix Meyer Scholarship.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2022

winner y separately published work icon Dark As Last Night Tony Birch , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2021 19702775 2021 selected work short story

'Dark as Last Night confirms, once again, that Tony Birch is a master of the short story. These exceptional stories capture the importance of human connection at pivotal moments in our lives, whether those occur because of the loss of a loved one or the uncertainties of childhood. In this collection we witness a young girl struggling to protect her mother from her father’s violence, two teenagers clumsily getting to know one another by way of a shared love of music, and a man mourning the death of his younger brother, while beset by memories and regrets from their shared past. Throughout this powerful collection, Birch’s concern for the humanity of those who are often marginalised or overlooked shines bright.'

Source : publisher's blurb

Year: 2021

winner y separately published work icon A Room Made of Leaves Kate Grenville , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2020 18931283 2020 single work novel historical fiction

'Do not believe too quickly…

'What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir?

'In her introduction Kate Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of discovering a long-hidden box containing that memoir. What follows is a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.

'Grenville’s Elizabeth Macarthur is a passionate woman managing her complicated life—marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her own heart, the search for power in a society that gave her none—with spirit, cunning and sly wit.

'Her memoir reveals the dark underbelly of the polite world of Jane Austen. It explodes the stereotype of the women of the past: devoted and docile, accepting of their narrow choices. That was their public face—here’s what one of them really thought.

'At the centre of this book is one of the most toxic issues of our times: the seductive appeal of false stories. Beneath the surface of Elizabeth Macarthur’s life and the violent colonial world she navigated are secrets and lies with the dangerous power to shape reality.

'A Room Made of Leaves is the internationally acclaimed author Kate Grenville’s first novel in almost a decade. It is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand that gives the past the piercing immediacy of the present.'(Publication summary)

Year: 2020

winner y separately published work icon The Yield Tara June Winch , Melbourne : Hamish Hamilton , 2019 15449866 2019 single work novel

'After a decade in Europe August Gondiwindi returns to Australia for the funeral of her much-loved grandfather, Albert, at Prosperous House, her only real home and also a place of great grief and devastation.

'Leading up to his death Poppy Gondiwindi has been compiling a dictionary of the language he was forbidden from speaking after being sent to Prosperous House as a child. Poppy was the family storyteller and August is desperate to find the precious book that he had spent his last energies compiling.

'The Yield also tells the story of Reverend Greenleaf, who recalls founding the first mission at Prosperous House and recording the language of the first residents, before being interred as an enemy of the people, being German, during the First World War.

'The Yield, in exquisite prose, carefully and delicately wrestles with questions of environmental degradation, pre-white contact agriculture, theft of language and culture, water, religion and consumption within the realm of a family mourning the death of a beloved man.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Works About this Award

NSW Premier's Literary Awards Shortlist Indigenous and Climate Change Stories Linda Morris , 2016 single work column
— Appears in: Brisbane Times , 14 April 2016;
'Tony Birch has been many times a bridesmaid, but there is one literary prize he wouldn't mind losing – the new standalone prize for indigenous writers announced as part of the 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards' shortlist on Thursday. ...'
Indigenous Writers Celebrated Linda Morris , 2016 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 15 April 2016; (p. 13)
Out-of-the-Box Novel Takes Top Prize Award for Book That Had a Tortuous Birth Susan Wyndham , 2015 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 19 May 2015; (p. 16) The Canberra Times , 19 May 2015; (p. 3)
Bookmarks Jason Steger , 2011 single work column
— Appears in: The Saturday Age , 21 May 2011; (p. 33)
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