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About the award
The Stella Prize is a beloved and well-respected annual literary prize awarded to the most excellent, original and outstanding book written by an Australian woman or non-binary writer.
The purpose is to promote books by Australian women writers in all their diversity, support greater participation in the world of literature, and create a more equitable and vibrant national culture.
“This year’s shortlist is consequential for Australian literary history, as it is the first time the Stella Shortlist features only women of colour. Now in its 13th year, these works showcase an incredible command of craft and understanding of our uncertain time. These works are riveting, and they stood out to the judging panel for their integrity, compassion and fearlessness.” Astrid Edwards – Chair of the Judges 2025
Winner of the 2025 Stella Prize
Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser – available in DAISY Audio
It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students - and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Theory and Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.
Stella Shortlisted books
Translations by Jumaana Abdu – available in DAISY Audio
Amid a series of personal disasters, Aliyah and her daughter, Sakina, retreat to rural NSW to make a new life. Aliyah manages to secure a run-down property and hires a farmhand, Shep, an extremely private Palestinian man and the region's imam. Jumaana Abdu’s debut novel, Translations, challenges every assumption a reader may hold.
The Burrow by Melanie Cheng – available in DAISY Audio
A wise and moving story about a family navigating grief, hope and healing through a bond with a new pet rabbit. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others - even of a small rabbit.
Black Convicts by Santilla Chingaipe – available in DAISY Audio
The story of Australia’s Black convicts has been all but erased from our history. In recovering their lives, Santilla Chingaipe offers a fresh understanding of this fatal shore, showing how empire, slavery, race and memory have shaped our nation. Black Convicts will change the way we think about who we are.
Black Witness by Amy McQuire – available in DAISY Audio
From one of Australia's leading Indigenous journalists comes a collection of fierce and powerful essays proving why the media need to believe Black witnesses and showcasing ways that journalism can be used to hold the powerful to account and make the world a more equitable place.
Cactus Pear For My Beloved by Samah Sabawi – available in DAISY Audio
Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands. Filled with love for land, history, peoples - it is more than anything else, a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling.
Stella Longlisted books
Naag Mountain by Manisha Anjali
A remarkable debut collection by an Australian and New Zealand poet of Indo-Fijian background, the descendant of indentured labourers. Naag Mountain is an imagined recovery of the little-known cultural inheritance of a displaced and exploited people. Historical figures, folk characters and spirits are entwined in a narrative poem coloured by the surrealism of dreams.
A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle – available in DAISY Audio
The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of ways.
Rapture by Emily Maguire – available in DAISY Audio
The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At 18, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and secure a place at the revered Fulda monastery. Rapture is an imaginative and audacious historical novel from the best-selling author of Love Objects and An Isolated Incident.
Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders
In this stunningly inventive and thought-provoking collection, Mykaela Saunders poses the question: what might country, community and culture look like in the Tweed if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty? Epic in scope, and with a diverse cast of characters, Always Will Be is the groundbreaking winner of the 2022 David Unaipon Award. This is a forward-thinking collection that refuses cynicism and despair and instead offers entertaining stories that celebrate Goori ways of being, knowing, doing – and becoming.
The Thinning by Inga Simpson – coming soon to Vision Australia Library
A powerful literary page-turner about two young people in a race against time to reach a monumental solar eclipse, from famed Australian novelist Inga Simpson. The Thinning is both an exquisitely written novel of nature and urgent thriller by the bestselling and acclaimed author of Willowman and The Last Woman in the World.
Peripathetic by Cher Tan
Cher Tan’s essays are as non-linear as her life, as she travels across borders that are simultaneously tightening and blurring. Paying homage to the many outsider artists, punks, drop-outs and rogue philosophers who came before, this book is about the resistance of orthodoxies — even when it feels impossible.