The Stella Prize for 2019 has been released!
The Stella Prize is a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing, and an organisation that champions cultural change.
The six books are concerned with the most important questions of how to live now, and writers demonstrate first-rate critical thinking capabilities, tremendous imagination and a readiness to take risks with form.
the bridge – enza gandolfo
Drawing on true events of Australia’s worst industrial accident—a tragedy that still scars the city—The Bridge is a profoundly moving novel that examines class, guilt, and moral culpability. Yet it shows that even the most harrowing of situations can give way to forgiveness and redemption. Ultimately, it is a testament to survival and the resilience of the human spirit.
The erratics – Vicki laveau-harvie
We've been disowned and disinherited: there's not changing it, I say. When something bad happens to them, we'll know soon enough and we'll deal with it together. I don't realise it at the time, but when I say that, I imply I care. I imply there may be something to be salvaged. I misspeak. But I'm flying out anyway. Blood calls to blood; what can I tell you.
Winner of the 2018 Finch Memoir Prize
little gods – jenny ackland
Little Gods is a novel about the mess of family, about vengeance and innocence lost. It explores resilience and girlhood and questions how families live with all of their complexities and contradictions. Resonating with echoes of great Australian novels like Seven Little Australians, Cloudstreet, and Jasper Jones, Little Gods is told with similar idiosyncrasy, insight and style.
too much lip –melissa lucashenko
Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, over the border. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of grabbing on to people. Old family wounds open as the Salters fight to stop the development of their beloved river. And the unexpected arrival on the scene of a good-looking dugai fella intent on loving her up only adds more trouble – but then trouble is Kerry’s middle name.
Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seems possible.
pink mountain on locust island – Jamie Marina Lau
In bursts of fizzing, staccato and claustrophobic prose, this modern Australian take on the classic hard-boiled novel bounces you between pulverised English, elastic Cantonese and the new dialect of a digitised world.
Embracing the noir tradition and featuring a prose style quite unlike any before, with references that will go both over your head and under your feet, Pink Mountain on Locust Island will flip readers upside down and turn your understanding of the world around around.
Winner of the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Readings
axiomatic – Maria Tumarkin
The past shapes the present — they teach us this in schools and universities. But the past cannot be visited like an ageing relative; the past doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past — ours, our family’s, our culture’s — wields now?
Beliefs — or intuitions — about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live.
