The shortlist for this year’s Stella Prize has been announced! The Stella Prize seeks to elevate the work of Australian women and non-binary writers. The $60,000 prize is awarded annually to one outstanding book deemed to be original, excellent, and engaging. This year’s prize saw over 200 entries.
Explore the 2023 Stella Prize shortlist below.
We Come With This Place by Debra Dank
We Come with This Place is deeply personal, a profound tribute to family and the Gudanji Country to which Debra Dank belongs, but it is much more than that. There is great pain in these pages, and anger at injustice, but also great love, in marriage and in family, and for the land.
Dank faces head on the ingrained racism, born of brutal practice and harsh legislation, that lies always under the skin of Australia, the racism that calls a little Aboriginal girl names and beats and rapes and disenfranchises the generations before hers. She describes sudden terrible violence, between races and sometimes at home. But overwhelmingly this is a book about strong, beloved parents and grandparents, guiding and teaching their children and grandchildren what country means.
Big Beautiful Female Theory by Eloise Grills
Part memoir, part cultural analysis, this illustrated work from Melbourne-based artist Eloise Grills is confrontational, honest and everything great nonfiction should be.
Grills' sharp analysis – often punctuated with a dark wit – fiercely explores beauty standards, misogyny, historical erasure and many more themes with satisfying complexity; it is a work concerned with picking apart the unseen structures that bind us. Incredibly intimate yet sweeping in scope, this is a liberating read that acknowledges and respects the lived trauma of those most damaged by society.
The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt
With electrifying boldness, Sarah Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief.
Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and fearlessly probing the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt’s lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.
Hydra by Adriane Howell
This highly original debut blends black humour and Gothic mystery to tell the story of a woman in the process of unravelling, as her job, her home, her marriage, her friends and her identity are all stripped away.
Set along the windswept coast of the Peninsula, and featuring an inventive use of historical naval documents, Hydra is a cool, stylish psychodrama with an unapologetic and flawed heroine at its heart.
Indelible City by Louisa Lim
The story of Hong Kong has long been obscured by competing myths: to Britain, a ‘barren rock’ with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial that had at last returned to the ancestral fold. To its inhabitants, the city was a place of refuge and rebellion, whose own history was so little taught that they began mythmaking their own past.
When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim-raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who had covered the region for a decade-realised that she was uniquely positioned to unearth Hong Kong’s untold stories.
Bad Art Mother by Edwina Preston
Good mothers are expected to be selfless. Artists are seen as selfish. So what does this mean for a mother with artistic ambitions? Enter: frustrated poet Veda Gray, who is offered a Faustian bargain when a wealthy childless couple, the Parishes, invite her to exchange her young son Owen for time to write.
Veda’s story unfolds as an adult Owen reflects on his boyhood in the Melbourne suburbs, and in the vibrant bohemian inner-city art world where his restaurateur father was a king. Meanwhile, the talented women in his orbit - Veda, Mrs Parish, wife of an influential poet, muralist and restaurant worker Rosa - push against gender expectations to be recognised as legitimate artists, by their intimates and the wider world.
If you would like to read the complete Stella Prize 2023 shortlist you can save $28 with our special Stella Prize shortlist pack! The pack is available online only, and not in our shops. Please note that stock is limited, but that we expect a top-up delivery within a few days. Shortlist packs will be dispatched once all stock has arrived.
