The shortlist for the 2025 Stella Prize has been announced! For thirteen years the Stella Prize has been celebrating and championing the stories of Australian women and non-binary individuals, which continues with this year's shortlist of six incredible books.
'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 judges
The 2025 winner of the Stella Prize will be announced on Friday 23 May at Sydney Writers Festival; until then, you can get any book on the shortlist at 20% off RRP when ordering online! Just enter the code STELLA25 at checkout to receive the discount!
This offer is only available online, until 11:59pm on Thursday 22 May.
The 2025 Stella Prize Shortlist:
Translations
Jumaana Abdu
Amid a series of personal disasters, Aliyah and her daughter, Sakina, retreat to rural New South Wales 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.
During a storm, she drives past the town's river and happens upon a childhood friend, Hana, who has been living a life of desperation. Aliyah takes her in and tries to navigate the indefinable relationships between both Hana and her farmhand. Tensions rise as Aliyah's growing bond with Shep strains her devotion to Hana.
Finally, all are thrown together for a reckoning alongside Hana's brother, Hashim, and Aliyah's confidante, Billie – a local Kamilaroi midwife she met working at the hospital – while bushfires rage around them.
The Burrow
Melanie Cheng
Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy's mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy?
The Burrow tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others – even of a small rabbit.
Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia
Santilla Chingaipe
The story of Australia’s Black convicts has been all but erased from our history. In this deeply researched and illuminating book, Santilla Chingaipe offers a fresh understanding of this fatal shore, showing how empire, slavery, race and memory have shaped this nation.
On the First Fleet of 1788, at least 15 convicts were of African descent. By 1840 the number of Black transportees had risen to over 500. But although some of these lives were documented and their likenesses painted, their stories have been erased from history: even their descendants are often unaware of their ancestry.
In these stories spanning Africa, the Americas and Europe, Black Convicts uncovers Australia’s hidden links to slavery, which both powered the British Empire and inspired the convict system itself. Situating European settlement in its global context, Chingaipe shows how the injustice of dispossession was powered by the engine of labour exploitation.
Theory & Practice
Michelle de Kretser
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. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.
Theory & 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.
Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.
Black Witness: The Power of Indigenous Media
Amy McQuire
From one of this country'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.
Amy McQuire has been writing on Indigenous affairs since she was seventeen years old and, over the past eighteen years, has reported on most of the key events involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including numerous deaths in custody, the Palm Island uprising, the Bowraville murders and the Northern Territory Intervention. She has also drawn attention to the misrepresentations and violence of mainstream media accounts, and also to their omissions and silences in regards to Indigenous matters altogether. In myriad ways the mainstream media has repeatedly failed to report accurately, responsibly or comprehensively on Indigenous affairs.
Black Witness is the essential collection of First Nations journalism that we need right now – and always have.
Cactus Pear For My Beloved
Samah Sabawi
The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland.
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. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.
