Six debut authors are among the twelve writers longlisted for this year’s Stella Prize for women and non-binary writers. The longlist, announced on Tuesday night at the Adelaide Writers’ Week, includes seven works of fiction, four non-fiction and one book of poetry.
The longlisted authors each receive $1000 in prize money, funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. The books go on to compete in the shortlist, which will be announced on April 8.
Astrid Edwards, Chair of the Judges for 2025, said that despite literary prizes being “subjective beasts…all the works on this year’s longlist are remarkable.”
“While different in form and function, each work fulfils its promise to the reader with exceptional craft,” Edwards said in a statement. “These are works to transport you elsewhere and reflect on not only our history but what yet may come. To the writers on the longlist, thank you. The time and skill required to weave together story is too often unregarded. Your words are beautiful, and they will stay with me.”
Edwards and her team of judges read a total of 180 entries to narrow the longlist down to twelve titles. This year’s judges were Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Debra Dank, Leah Jing McIntosh and Rick Morton.
They 12 titles on the longlist include:
Fiction
A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle (Picador)
Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders (UQP)
The Burrow by Melanie Cheng (Text)
Rapture by Emily Maguire (A&U)
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser (Text)
The Thinning by Inga Simpson (Hachette)
Translations by Jumaana Abdu (Vintage)
Non fiction
Black Witness by Amy McQuire (UQP)
Cactus Pear For My Beloved by Samah Sabawi (Penguin)
Peripathetic by Cher Tan (NewSouth)
Black Convicts by Santilla Chingaipe (Scribner)
Poetry
Naag Mountain by Manisha Anjali (Giramondo)
Among the debut works are Jumaana Abdu’s Translations, which follows a young Muslim woman struggling to establish a new life in rural NSW; Manisha Anjali’s Naag Mountain — a collection of poems that explores the cultural inheritance of indentured labourers; Samah Sabawi’s Cactus Pear For My Beloved — a memoir of the author’s Palestinian family; Cher Tan’s Peripathetic — a collection of essays; and Santilla Chingaipe’s Black Convicts, which judges described as a work that disrupts “our understanding of the convict archive and offers a new understanding of Australia’s participation in slavery since colonisation.”
Returning nominees for the prize include Emily Maguire, whose novel An Isolated Incident was shortlisted in 2017; Inga Simpson, whose second novel Nest was longlisted in 2015; and Michelle de Kretser, whose novel The Life to Come was shortlisted in 2018.
Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel Theory & Practice was described by judges as “a brilliantly autofictive 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.”
Emily Maguire’s tenth book, Rapture, traces the life of a young woman in ninth-century Mainz who disguises herself as a man in order to become a respected theological scholar. Judges praised the book for its “thought-provoking exploration of resilience and the possibilities contained within the female body.”
Inga Simpson’s “incandescent thriller” — The Thinning, is “a haunting ode to the ‘space between the stars’”, about two teenagers in the near future racing to witness a solar eclipse. “Her meticulous skill as a nature writer is evident in the way she brings astronomy to life, where our threatened dark skies portend the crushing loss of memory, history and culture,” according to judges.
Amy McQuire’s Black Witness is a searing and critically acclaimed series of essays which advocates for the representation of First Nations’ journalism and the ways it is inextricable from activism. Judges described the debut non-fiction as “a must-read for all engaged citizens, especially journalists who want to represent the fullness of contemporary Australia.”
From the same publishing house, University of Queensland Press, Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, Mykaela Saunders was also longlisted for her collection of speculative fiction, Always Will Be, which explores the question “What might country, community and culture look like in the Tweed if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty?” The book, released in February last year, has been recognised by the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and Saunders was described by Stella judges as a novelist with “an expansive imagination that draws from the strength of First Nations relations to propel her prose beyond expectation.”
The Stella Prize began in 2013 and is awarded to one outstanding book by an Australian woman or non-binary writer, which is deemed to be ‘original, excellent, and engaging’.
The winner will be announced on 23 May and will take home $60,000 in prize money. Previous winners include Charlotte Wood, Emily Bitto, Heather Rose and Jess Hill. Last year’s winner, Alexis Wright, became the first author to win the prize twice — for Praiseworthy (2024) and Tracker (2018).