Australian soldiers firing on Japanese positions on Mount Shiburangu near Wewak, Papua New Guinea, June 1945.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
War writing can be formulaic and clichéd, but Catherine McKinnon resists glorification and the usual narrative of “us against them” .
Alones/Shutterstock
The intriguing stories in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Astronauts bring obscure historical footnotes to life.
Mikael Damkier/Shutterstock
Safe Haven is an excoriating account of a shameful period of Australian history, told in a life-affirming voice that imagines a more humane future.
The shortlisted authors, clockwise from top left: Hayley Singer, Katia Ariel, Emily O'Grady, Alexis Wright, Katherine Brabon and Sanya Rushdi.
Composite image/The Conversation, The Stella Prize
This year’s shortlist doesn’t offer much in the way of consolation, but it might shake up how you see the world.
Gleb Dolskiy/Pexels
An 8000-km hitchhiking trip is at the heart of Anna Broinowski’s Datsun Angel. Dominic Gordon, in contrast, kicks his young self around Melbourne’s alleys like a half-squashed can of energy drink.
Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus moluccanus).
Bernard Dupont, via Wikimedia Commons
For poet Robert Adamson, the natural world offered a form of deliverance.
Author provided
The End of the Morning is Charmian Clift’s most successful piece of fiction. But it is only a piece and one that leaves two matters unresolved.
Winnie Dunn.
Hachette
Winnie Dunn has made it her project to bring a more sensitive intercultural understanding to an unfamiliar readership
Shutterstock
Australian literature is a rich and largely untapped source of information about how Australians think about AI.
Edgar Degas, Interior, 1868 or 1869.
Wikimedia Commons
At a time when women had limited rights, writers found ways to raise the issues of coercion and control.
Nam Le.
Simon & Schuster
To ask whether 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem is a collection of poems or a single long poem is to step through the looking glass.
The Otago (1884).
State Library of Queensland. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Gail Jones has written a richly evocative novel that warrants attention, both for its fascinating subject-matter and for its outstanding writerly qualities.
Marion Halligan (1940-2024).
YouTube
Marion Halligan wrote novels that are compulsively readable and full of ideas.
Georgia Blain.
Scribe Publications
Georgia Blain’s final, posthumous collection offers clear-eyed, calm compassion – and a capacity to live with, and alongside, damage, trauma and unspeakable loss, and a way of staying human.
Getty
The owner of Robinsons Bookshop has listed several kinds of books ‘missing’ from its shelves, including ‘kids picture books with just white kids on the cover’.
Photo of J.M. Coetzee: Laterthanyouthink, via Wikimedia Commons
The fiction of J.M. Coetzee is always formally daring, brave in its social critique and its refusal to play by the rules.
Mosaic, al-Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem.
Salajean/Shutterstock
Politica is set in an unnamed town where past is ever present, and the present is barely tolerable in the absence of a hopeful future.
Nayef Hammouri/Shutterstock
In her prose and her poetry, Sara M. Saleh renders unique the ways people resist, transcend, adapt, make the best of things, compromise, endure, and lose hope and faith.
Morpheus Szeto/Shutterstock
Research suggests the act of creative writing can have therapeutic benefits.
Sunrise near Winton, Central Queensland.
Trevor McKinnon/Unsplash
Alex Miller is a man of humble origins, adventurous journeys, and a slow-burning but ultimately impressive literary career.