The six titles shortlisted for this year’s Stella Prize were all published by small and independent Australian publishers, including Affirm Press, Echo Publishing, Wakefield Press and Transit Lounge. It’s the first time small and independent publishers have made a clean sweep in the 10-year old prize for women and non-binary writers.
The titles are:
Indelible City by Louisa Lim (Text Publishing)
We Come With This Place by Debra Dank (Echo Publishing)
big beautiful female theory by Eloise Grills (Affirm Press)
The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt (University of Queensland Press)
Hydra by Adriane Howell (Transit Lounge)
Bad Art Mother by Edwina Preston (Wakefield Press)
Chair of this year’s Judging Panel, writer Alice Pung OAM, said that despite the differences between each book, “common themes emerge about a woman’s relationship to her art and to the world around her.”
“All our shortlisted books also explore with moving complexity some of the most pivotal relationships in a woman’s life, and their roles as daughters, partners, wives, and mothers,” she said.
Pung and her team of judges, including Gomeroi writer Alison Whittaker, writer and editor Jeff Sparrow, and critics Astrid Edwards and Beejay Silcox searched for “a sense of uncontrived emotional resonance, and the work’s power to transcend its immediate appeal to become an enduring shifter of culture.”
“We looked for ‘originality’ not only in content but in form, and ‘excellence’ at both a holistic and sentence-by-sentence level,” Pung explained. “Our shortlist includes both established and debut creators – but all of the publishers are small presses. This speaks to the importance of small publishers in amplifying Australia’s most exciting, innovative, and creative work.”
Each shortlisted author receives $4,000 in prize money. The overall winner, who will be announced on April 27, will receive $60,000.
Executive Director of Stella, Jaclyn Booton said this year’s titles showcase exciting and innovative works across a range of forms.
“These six books deftly interrogate balance: of hope and grief, the creative and the domestic, the life-altering and the mundane,” she said. “These are powerful works of literature, and they embody the strength of women’s writing in Australia. Congratulations to all of the shortlisted authors on their achievement!”
Below, we look at the six titles.
Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim (Text Publishing)
Louisa Lim is a Melbourne-based journalist and University of Melbourne lecturer, whose book combines reportage of protestors in Hong Kong alongside an investigation into Hong Kong’s contested histories.
Judges described the book as “a vibrant international literary achievement” and “amazing… a real surprise.”
“The work challenges how the media frames stories ‘from both sides’, and poses questions for all forms of history making, including contemporary non-fiction and memoir,” judges said.
“By choosing to participate in – and not just stand witness to – events, and then critiquing her reasons for doing so, Lim transgresses traditional expectations of journalism and forces the reader to consider the role journalism plays in shaping our understanding of the world.”
“Indelible City is a vibrant international literary achievement, speaking to the shifting geopolitical moment we find ourselves in while also examining the ongoing legacy of imperialism and colonialism.”
In an interview with ArtsHub, Lim, a former BBC journalist, said a book like her’s “is not the kind of book that would normally be nominated for a prize – it’s non-fiction for a start.”
“Stella Prize is just such a really high-profile prize, so I wasn’t expecting it at all, I’m thoroughly delighted,” she said.
“I was really reluctant to do that at first, because it seemed to go against those rules of journalism by which I’ve lived for the last 25 years.”
“Objectivity and distance has always been such a cornerstone. But, in trying to report the story, it was just impossible to remove the city from me and me from the city, because it was a place that made me, that shaped me.”
“Because how can you remove yourself when protests are happening all around you, and when the city that you love, your hometown, is being changed forever?”
We Come With This Place by Debra Dank (Echo Publishing)
Gudanji/Wakaja woman Debra Dank published her memoir in July 2022, through Sydney-based publishing house Echo Publishing, headed by Juliet Rogers.
In her book, Dank, a resident of the Barkly Tablelands in the Northern Territory, explores love, marriage, family and country, through the lens of a Gudanji Country woman.
“Dank treats Country with agency and power, and Country is what holds her stories in place,” the judges wrote in their report. “She complicates many of our assumptions as readers, including what to expect of memoir as a form and where to direct our attention. A memoir of unique grace and defiant power.”
The book has already been swept up a series of prizes, including Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, Indigenous Writers’ Prize and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.
It was shortlisted for the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and included as a title on the Grattan Institute’s Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List 2022.
Miles Franklin Award winner, Melissa Lucashenko, a former Stella short-listed author herself, said Dank’s book was the best book she read last year.
“This is a heart-stopping voyage into bush Aboriginal life, philosophy and history,” she said. “Dank’s grandmother was a Law Boss for her Gudanji Country; her father literally ran for his life from frontier violence. Her memoir of growing up on remote Queensland cattle stations, drinking from sacred hidden rock-wells, educated by correspondence school and living in a caravan it was illegal for her Aboriginal parents to own, will surprise, delight and astound you.’
big beautiful female theory by Eloise Grills (Affirm Press)
Victorian artist and writer Eloise Grills published three chapbooks before publishing her first full-length title with Melbourne-based publisher Affirm Press in June last year.
The book is a series of visual essays, exploring the fat body in all its elemental, spiritual and physical realms.
It’s been described by the judges as “ambitious” and “impressive”.
“big beautiful female theory is disarmingly raw, both in what it reveals about its narrator and subject, and in its deceivingly slapdash composition,” judges said. “But Grills maintains a self-awareness that’s rarely self-indulgent, and at times zooms out from introspection without the suspicion of the reader – and then it implicates us.”
Lena Dunham, creator of Girls, said that Grills’ words “f**k me up in a good way.”
“If I were a tween on TikTok I’d call you mother and queen and Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” she said. “But I’m not, so I’ll just say thank you for what you make and say.”
The book has already been shortlisted for the 2023 Indie Book Award for Illustrated Nonfiction, highly commended in the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction and highly commended by the judges of the 2021 Peter Blazey Fellowship.
In her review of Grills’ book, Penni Russon wrote that the author “… fluctuates between radical self-acceptance and objecting herself. As a woman reader, I am aware that I generate and multiply the internalised male gaze, and that I am also an object of it.”
“Grills reflects, refracts and inflects my own sense of well-being, embodied precarity, vulnerability, violence, and abjection. She makes sure her reader knows that art-making and writing are ambivalent acts for her. They don’t necessarily alleviate the trauma of growing up female.”
The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt (University of Queensland Press)
Gold Coast born poet Sarah Holland-Batt’s third volume of poetry was published by University of Queensland Press in May 2022.
Judges described the collection of poems as a “remarkable sequence about the death of the author’s father from Parkinson’s disease: tender, memorable poems that capture grief and loss and love through unforgettable imagery, often blended with humour.”
“Throughout the collection, Sarah Holland-Batt investigates the body as a site of both pleasure and frailty, writing equally effectively about sex, romance, and ageing.”
Miles Franklin award winner and former Stella shortlisted author Michelle de Kretser, described the collection of poems as a “tour de force” that will leave readers “dazzled and devastated.”
“The wisdom, kindness and musical rigour of these poems is everywhere apparent,” she said. “Their emotional range is considerable: intimate, sorrowing, celebratory and philosophical by turn. Sarah Holland-Batt possesses a mighty and singular talent, showcased here in all its glory.’
In an interview with The Guardian last May, Holland-Batt described the poet’s task as one that requires “one to look at the world and find a language for things that seem to escape language. Watching someone decline can feel beyond language.”
Hydra by Adriane Howell (Transit Lounge)
Melbourne-based writer Adriane Howell published her debut novel last August with Transit Lounge. Howell is a co-founder of the literary journal Gargouille, and completed her Master of Creative Writing (Publishing and Editing) from University of Melbourne in 2013.
Hydra was described by the judges as a “startlingly original novel” that contains “many faces, twists, and turns, and yet works cohesively as a story of great intrigue and black humour.”
“The story unravels towards something darker, more sinister – while never veering away from that unique sardonic humour,” judges said. “This is a truly weird and awe-some book in the best sense of those words, with an eccentricity that is never posturing or forced.”
Previous titles from Transit Lounge nominated for the Stella Prize include Catherine de Saint Phalle’s Poum and Alexandre and S.L Lim’s Revenge: Murder in Three Parts.
Bad Art Mother by Edwina Preston (Wakefield Press)
Melbourne-based writer Edwina Preston published her third book Bad Art Mother, with Adelaide publishing house, Wakefield Press in March 2022.
According to Preston herself, the book had been rejected 25 times before Wakefield decided to take it on.
Christos Tsiolkas called the novel a “magnificent panorama of a novel, written with an assured verve, that encompasses art and feminism, love and marriage.”
“There is anger here, as there must be when telling the story of how women have been silenced in the world – but there is also a scrupulous empathy for every character: this is a humane and tender work. The conception is daring, yet Preston has the confidence and talent and assuredness as a writer to never stumble in the storytelling. I was never less than enthralled…”
Stella judges said the novel incorporates elements of real Melbourne literary history “…into an account of fictional poet Veda Gray struggling with the bounds of convention in a post-war Australia deeply inhospitable to women writers.”
“Veda’s letters and the memories of her conflicted son Owen combine, complement and contradict each other, in a clever, warm, and very moving novel about motherhood, sacrifice, and the claims of art.”
The Stella Prize winner for 2023 will be announced at a ceremony in Sydney on the evening of April 27, 2023. The winner will also appear at the Sydney Writer’s Festival.