Over the semester break, the Main Library will have some of the books that were announced on the 2024 Stella Prize shortlist available for you to read before the winner is announced on the 2nd of May at the State Library of Victoria.
The Stella Prize, beginning in 2012, has quickly become one of the most prestigious literary awards within Australia. It was established by 11 Australian women writers, editors, publishers, and booksellers, who, in response to the poor representation of women’s fiction within the infamous Miles Franklin Literary Award and other major awards, created an award exclusively for women and non-binary writers.
Apart from their highly esteemed Stella Prize, Stella also contributes in many other ways to tackle the gender bias present in Australia’s literature culture. They host the Stella Day Out in Australia’s UNESCO City of Literature, Melbourne, which is a free one-day literary festival celebrating the contributions of women and non-binary authors to Australian literature. They also have several writer’s residences which echo the words of Virginia Woolf who stated that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Notably, they complete an annual statistical analysis of gender bias in the Australian literary industry called the Stella Count. The last review found that “women authors now receive equal attention in Australian book reviews for the first time in the Stella Count’s history,” however, there is still a disparity when it comes to the length of reviews. They also found that women are highly represented in reviews regarding children’s and young adult fiction but are underrepresented within the non-fiction genre. By completing these analyses so often, Stella helps to highlight where the Australian book industry can be doing better for women and non-binary authors.
The shortlist this year is a great mix of new and upcoming debut texts such as Abandon Every Hope by Hayley Singer and Hospital by Sanya Rushdi, as well as returning authors such as the award-winning Waanyi author, Alexis Wright, who after ten years, has returned with her book Praiseworthy. You can find interviews with these authors and videos of Australian actors reading these texts on the Stella Prize website at https://stella.org.au/.
On display in the Main Library foyer will be the shortlisted texts, some from the 2024 longlist such as Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko and She is the Earth by Ali Cobby Eckermann, as well as the past prize winners for 2023, 2022, and 2021. We hope you enjoy these texts while we all anticipate who 2024’s winner will be!
Cited:
Woolf, V. (1945). A Room of One’s Own. Penguin.