The Stella prize
The Stella prize is Australia's most prestigious award celebrating and recognising the vibrancy and complexity of women and non-binary writers and their contribution to culture.
The winner is selected from an initial long list of excellent, original and engaging twelve works down to a short list of six. This is its tenth year and the winner of the Stella prize with $50,000 prize money!
For more information or to view the announcement, head to the
Stella Prize website
.... and the winner is
Dropbear - Evelyn Araluen
Available as eBook through IndyReads
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EVELYN ARALUEN
Evelyn Araluen is a poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her widely published criticism, fiction and poetry has been awarded the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship, and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant. Born and raised on Dharug country, she is a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation. Evelyn’s debut collection Dropbear won the 2022 Stella Prize.
ABOUT THE BOOK
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.
If you'd like to sink your teeth into some of the other books that made it onto the short and long list we have the following available online
From the shortlist...
Bodies of light - Jennifer Down
Available as eBook through Borrowbox
Told with a kind of conversational intimacy – inviting the reader in, rationalising, second-guessing, accounting, defending, justifying – Jennifer Down inhabits the voice of a woman who has experienced a great deal of trauma, while evoking a history of south-east Melbourne from the 1970s into the present.
Stone Fruit - Lee Lai
Lee Lai’s Stone Fruit is a moving graphic novel in which queer couple, Bron and Ray, find themselves at a tense crossroads in their relationship.
From the longlist...
Coming of age in the war on terror - Randa Abdel-Fattah
Randa Abdel-Fattah was inspired to write this book after a young Muslim boy told her that school was no longer “the one place he felt safe.” In this searing analysis of state incompetence and abuse, she weaves academic ideas with the real-life experiences of children of the 9-11 generation, both Muslim and other.
She is haunted - Paige Clark
Featuring an array of protagonists who are almost all women caught in moments of unease, uncertainty and transformation, Clark’s assured, inventive voice never wavers as she moves across eclectic, strange, and sometimes surreal subject matter.
Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray - Anita Heiss
Anita Heiss has chronicled the story of one woman’s fight to maintain her dignity in a dramatically changing world. In so doing, Heiss has written a story for her people certainly, but she has also written a story for the nation.