Is Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy the great Australian novel? Beejay Silcox, chair of the Stella Prize judging panel that selected it as this year’s winner, thinks it might be.
The first three winners of the Stella Prize, at the 2015 ceremony. Left to right: Clare Wright (2014, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka), inaugural winner Carrie Tiffany (2013, Mateship with Birds) and Emily Bitto (2015, The Strays).
The Stella Prize, Connor Tomas O'Brien
As conversations about literary representation evolve, so does the Stella Prize. Five of the 12 authors on the tenth Stella Prize longlist are Indigenous, one is non-binary, and genre is in the mix.
Emily McPherson College Library, Russell St, circa 1960s.
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The books chosen as finalists in this year’s Stella Prizes can help us draw on our innate resources. We can seek inner truths and explore ways to support each other thanks to these gifted writers.
This year’s Stella Prize shortlist is difficult to sum up or pin down - but the experiences of young people are a recurring theme.
Stella Prize/The Conversation
The six books shortlisted for this year’s Stella prize cover diverse subject matter and make risky aesthetic choices; they are serious and thoroughly unsentimental.
None of the books on the Stella shortlist offer a comforting vision of contemporary Australian life.
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All six books nominated for the Stella Prize - to be announced tonight - engage the brain, and the heart. These are books that matter because they show us how to live in desperate times.
How many non-white writers are published in Australia each year? Is their job to remain at the exotic margins of our literary culture?
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A recent attempt to broaden the Stella Count by measuring the diversity of writers reviewed proved to be a hard ask. Is the bigger problem here the whiteness of our publishing industry?