The longlist for this year’s Stella Prize has been announced! The Stella Prize seeks to elevate the work of Australian women writers – cis, trans, and non-binary inclusive. The $50,000 prize is awarded annually to one outstanding book deemed to be original, excellent, and engaging.

Below are the 12 longlisted books for the 2022 Stella Prize.

Coming of Age in the War on Terror by Randa Abdel-Fattah

We now have a generation - Muslim and non-Muslim - who have grown up only knowing a world at war on terror. These young people have been socialised in a climate of widespread Islamophobia, surveillance and suspicion.

In Coming of Age in the War on Terror Randa Abdel-Fattah, a leading scholar and popular writer, interrogates the impact of all this on young people’s trust towards adults and the societies they live in and their political consciousness. Read our review

Take Care by Eunice Andrada

Take Care explores what it means to survive within systems not designed for tenderness. Bound in personal testimony, the poems situate the act of rape within the machinery of imperialism, where human and non-human bodies, lands, and waters are violated to uphold colonial powers.

Andrada explores the magnitude of rape culture in the everyday: from justice systems that dehumanise survivors, to exploitative care industries that deny Filipina workers their agency, to nationalist monuments that erase the sexual violence of war.

Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen

Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality.

This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future. Read our review

She is Haunted by Paige Clark

A mother cuts her daughter’s hair because her own starts falling out. A woman leaves her boyfriend because he reminds her of a corpse. A widow physically transforms into her husband so that she does not have to grieve.

With piercing insights into transnational Asian identity, intergenerational trauma and grief, the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, the inexplicable oddities of female friendship, and the love of a good dog, Paige Clark has crafted an exquisite, moving and sophisticated debut work of fiction. Read our review

No Document by Anwen Crawford

No Document is an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion.

At once intimate and expansive, Anwen Crawford’s book-length essay explores loss in many forms: disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. From the turmoil of grief and the solace of memory, her perspective embraces histories of protest and revolution, and much more. Read our review

Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down

A quiet, small-town existence. An unexpected Facebook message, jolting her back to the past. A history she’s reluctant to revisit: dark memories and unspoken trauma, bruised thighs and warning knocks on bedroom walls, unfathomable loss. She became a new person a long time ago. What happens when buried stories are dragged into the light

This epic novel is a masterwork of tragedy and heartbreak-the story of a life in full. Bodies of Light confirms Jennifer Down as one of the writers defining her generation. Read our review

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss

Gundagai, 1852. The powerful Murrumbidgee River surges through town leaving death and destruction in its wake. Wagadhaany is one of the lucky ones. She survives. But is her life now better than the fate she escaped? Forced to move away from her miyagan, she lives each day with her broken heart calling to home.

When she meets Wiradyuri stockman Yindyamarra, Wagadhaany’s heart slowly begins to heal. But still, she dreams of a better life, away from the degradation of being owned. Read our review .

Stone Fruit by Lee Lai

Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties for Ray’s niece Nessie. Their bi-weekly playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in daily lives that ping-pong between familial tensions and isolation. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron turn to repair their broken family ties. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up to their respective sisters with surprising results. Read our review

Permafrost by SJ Norman

This brilliant collection of short fiction explores the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing. Inverting and queering the gothic and romantic traditions, each story represents a different take on the concept of a haunting or the haunted.

Though it ranges across themes and locations - from small-town Australia to Hokkaido to rural England - Permafrost is united by the power of the narratorial voice, with its auto-fictional resonances, dark wit and swagger. Read our review

Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki

Homecoming pieces together fragments of stories about four generations of Noongar women and explores how they navigated the changing landscapes of colonisation, protectionism, and assimilation to hold their families together.

This seminal collection of poetry, prose and historical colonial archives, tells First Nations truths of unending love for children-those that were present, those taken, those hidden and those that ultimately stood in the light.

The Open by Lucy Van

‘The poems here express indignation at the eventual consequences of privacy. Yet, equally, privacy fascinates me. Equally, fences fascinate me - their lines, their tensions, their bending. I am not the first to say that poetry is a form of enclosure, but I want to say it here again, anyway. I love how permeable this form of enclosure can be. In the same way, I loved how the fence around that private hill would bend as I moved through it.’ – Lucy Van

Read our review

Another Day in the Colony by Chelsea Watego

In this collection of deeply insightful and powerful essays, Chelsea Watego examines the ongoing and daily racism faced by First Nations peoples in so-called Australia. Drawing on her own experiences and observations of the operations of the colony, she exposes the lies that settlers tell about Indigenous people.

In refusing such stories, Chelsea tells her own- fierce, personal, sometimes funny, sometimes anguished. Read our review