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 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
Melbourne writer Alex Skovron has been recognised with a national award at 75. Alongside his own work, Skovron’s quiet impact on poets and poetry in Melbourne has been immense.
The 6 books on this year’s Stella Prize shortlist – including poetry, memoir, fiction and reportage – are idiosyncratic, activist and compelling.
Winners of the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards: Nicolas Rothwell, Mark Willacy, Sherryl Clark, Andy Jackson, Christine Helliwell and Leanne Hall.
The winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced. The awards are contentious – but are fought over precisely because of their symbolic and enduring cultural function
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.
Agricultural land and mountains alongside the railway line from Cape Town to Pretoria, South Africa.
David Grimwade/Alamy Stock Photo, Penguin
Damon Galgut joins a distinguished line of South African authors, who are grappling with the complex dynamics of the country’s white community in their writing.
What makes a winning book?
Women's Prize for Fiction
This separation or segregation of women’s writing should be understood as part of the patriarchal control of what and who matters – and, historically, women have not.
Rules for the UK’s most prestigious and lucrative literary prize effectively mean it is dominated by big publishers.
The Miles Franklin authors with their novels, clockwise from top left: Felicity Castagna, Eva Hornung, Kim Scott, Michelle de Kretser, Catherine McKinnon and Gerald Murnane.
Courtesy Perpetual/ Copyright Agency/ Martin Ollman/Timothy Hillier. Eva Hornung image: Noni Martin.
Bob Dylan is now a literary celebrity. And next week, the Booker Prize judges will anoint another. The tag is still chiefly attached to men but women authors shouldn’t despair: fame and good writing can be uneasy bedfellows.
Dylan is a musician, who has been well recognised in his field.
Simon Murphy/Flickr
Were there really no poets or novelists or essayists - no people who have spent their lives in the field of literature - considered Nobel-worthy? This nostalgic decision is discourteous to writers.
What are the criteria for a Prime Minister intervening in these awards? Literary reasons? Personal reasons? ‘History war’ reasons?
Michael Tapp
They should be our pre-eminent national writing prizes. Instead, these awards bob on the vast sea of daily politics, occasionally getting dumped by a breaker.