Sydney-based novelist Michelle de Kretser has won this year’s Stella Prize for her eighth book, Theory & Practice, published by Text Publishing.
Her win was announced at the Sydney Writers Festival tonight. The Sri Lankan-born writer receives $60,000 from the Stella Forever Fund. In her acceptance speech, de Kretser said that despite being “afraid”, she wanted to address the issue of censorship and democracy.
“We’ve seen scholars, creatives and journalists silenced, their funding revoked and their contracts cancelled for expressing anti-genocide views,” she said.
“We’ve seen our institutions and our media betray the principles they’re supposed to uphold. We’ve seen language suffer Orwellian distortions. We’ve seen our leaders pander to the anti-Arab racism of that global bully the United States. And all of this damage has been done to prop up Israel: a brazenly cruel foreign power, whose leaders are internationally wanted criminals.”
“In Australia today it isn’t those applauding mass murder who have cause to be afraid, but those speaking out against it. Principally targeted are Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, First Nations people, people of colour, queers.”
“All the time I was writing these words, a voice in my head whispered, You will be punished. You will be smeared with labels as potent and ugly as they’re false.”
“I’m still afraid. But I’ve just accepted a prize that is not about obedience. It’s not about feel-good narratives, it’s not about marketing, it’s not even about creativity – Stella is about changing the world.”
“They’re the women and girls murdered, maimed, starved, raped, tortured, terrorised, orphaned, bereaved, incarcerated, dehumanised, displaced… war crimes for which Australia provides material and diplomatic support. It shows you the limits of our democracy. That’s why I am begging more people to speak out – because they can’t go for us all.”
Set in 1980s Melbourne, her novel follows a young Sri Lankan-born graduate student as she navigates the complexities of academia at the University of Melbourne while managing a burdening love affair with a fellow student in a non-monogamous relationship.
Stella judges praised de Kretser’s novel for its “sharp examination of the complex pleasures” and described it as “a brilliantly auto fictive knot, composed of the shifting intensities and treacheries of young love, of complex inheritances both literary and maternal, of overwhelming jealousies and dark shivers of shame”.
Judges’ Chair Astrid Edwards called the work “an exceptional novel of hyper realism in which [the author is] at the height of her powers, interrogates the messiness of life found in the gap between theory and practice.”
Stella CEO Fiona Sweet described herself as a long-time fan of de Kretser’s works, adding: “[I am] constantly surprised and delighted while reading her books.”
“Theory & Practice is another example of the depth of her talent as a writer,” she said.
The novel has already garnered widespread acclaim, receiving positive reviews both here in Australia and abroad. The Guardian’s Jack Callil praised the “form-melding book” as one that “push[es] the margins of what a novel can look and feel like”.
The New York Times’ Emily Eakin called the book “a taut, enthralling hybrid of fact and fiction impossible to disentangle.”
Since its release in October last year, the novel has been nominated for a number of prestigious awards, including for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction and the BookPeople BookData Adult Fiction Book Of The Year.
Now in its thirteenth year, the Stella Prize has been championing the voices and stories of women and non-binary writers since 2013. Previous winners include Alexis Wright, Jess Hill, Vicki Laveau-Harvie and Charlotte Wood.
Image credit: Stella.
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