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2016 Stella Prize Longlist of Books by Australian Female Authors

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2016 Stella Prize Longlist of Books by Australian Female AuthorsLooking for a good read? Then you have to check out the 2016 Stella Prize Longlist of books written by Australian women in the past year.

The Stella Prize is a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing and championing diversity and cultural change. The prize is named after one of Australia’s iconic female authors, Stella Maria Sarah ‘Miles’ Franklin, and was awarded for the first time in 2013. Both nonfiction and fiction books by Australian women are eligible for entry.

From more than 170 entries, this year’s Stella Prize judges – author and academic Brenda Walker (chair); writer and social commentator Emily Maguire; award-winning writer and essayist Alice Pung; literary critic and author Geordie Williamson; and bookseller and founder of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation Suzy Wilson – have selected twelve books for the 2016 Stella Prize longlist.

Chair of the Stella Prize judging panel, Brenda Walker, said of the longlist: “The longlist for the 2016 Stella Prize demonstrates the current strength of Australian women’s narrative, featuring both highly accomplished new writers and many works that represent a culmination of the skills of established writers.”

“Excellent writing generates a culture of reading and appreciation of literature that in turn stimulates further literary creativity, and 2016 will prove to be a good year for this process of collective inspiration in our literary ecology,” said Ms Walker.

2016 Stella Prize Longlist

The Women’s Pages by Debra Adelaide (Pan Macmillan)
The Women’s Pages by Debra AdelaideThe Women’s Pages details two sources of attachment and constraint: maternal and literary. Dove, a writer, is haunted by Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights, which she read to her mother, at her mother’s request, during the final stages of her mother’s illness and death. Dove’s own novel is interspersed with memories, current experiences and with her central creative task of shaping the internal novel, offering a fascinating insight into literary and personal heritage, and into the decisions of a working writer and an enthralled reader. In the process, Debra Adelaide explores women’s prescribed roles in twentieth-century Australia.

The Women’s Pages is a limpid depiction of the relationship between mother and child, seen through an intense preoccupation with literature, and an observant charting of the day-to-day experiences of individual women.

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The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop (Hachette)
The Other Side of the World by Stephanie BishopThe Other Side of the World begins in an icy English winter when Charlotte, a painter, and her academic Indian husband Henry move to Western Australia in search of a new, lighter life. The suburbs of Perth in the 1950s are far more difficult to negotiate than Charlotte could have imagined. Beginning as a story about migration and the constraints of domesticity, The Other Side of the World expands into a tale of the nature of belonging, the complexity of motherhood and the dangers of nostalgia. The freedoms and duties imposed by culture, gender, race and class all emerge in this study of one particular marriage as it unravels in the West Australian heat.

Stephanie Bishop’s prose has a delicate, watercolour loveliness that belies the ferocity of her material. Two characters struggle to resolve an impossible contradiction: bound together by affection and need, their destinies ultimately diverge. Stephanie Bishop holds this struggle in perfect equipoise throughout.

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Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig (Spineless Wonders)
Panther and the Museum of Fire by Jen CraigPanthers and the Museum of Fire is about a woman returning a manuscript to the sister of its deceased writer. It is immersively written in a stream-of-consciousness style that takes the reader directly into her reflections on life, friendship and, importantly, her own writing.

The unpretentious truths and agonies, soul-searching and tenuous self-regard of the artist’s life are brilliantly and immediately depicted, in writing that deploys European modernist literary techniques in an Australian setting. In Jen Craig’s novella, voice, character and vocation combine in a sophisticated and accessible narrative.

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Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett Daylight (Random House)
Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett DaylightThe ten stories in this collection take the reader through the six bedrooms of teenagers. A cast of feckless, brilliant and believable characters experience first sexual encounters, illness, death and grief. All the stories in Six Bedrooms connect the reader with the world of adolescence, in a strong and urgent representation of the vulnerabilities and the loneliness of the young.

Tegan Bennett Daylight navigates her territory with great energy and skill. Her writing is fine-edged and precise, delivering an insider’s view of the minutiae of teenage lives. These stories elicit great concern for the young, and also for the state of parenthood. They are thoughtful, full of understanding about situations and motivations, and, almost painfully, believable.

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Hope Farm by Peggy Frew (Scribe)
Screen-Shot-2016-02-04-at-5.34.15-PM-138x214Hope Farm concerns thirteen-year-old Silver, who has spent her life being moved from ashram to ashram and commune to commune by her mother Ishtar. In 1985 the latest move – at the urging of her mother’s new lover – is to Hope Farm, a run-down, weed-strewn property in rural Victoria, where the commune’s adults stubbornly cling to the faded promise of their ideals.

Peggy Frew displays an acute understanding of the powerlessness of a child: Silver is at the mercy of adults who are oblivious to the depth of her emotions and strength of her intellect. She also portrays the sometimes pathetic, sometimes funny, sometimes harmful actions of the book’s adults, without allowing them to become caricatures or villains. In spite of its darkness, Hope Farm is written in prose infused with love and wonder for the world.

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A Few Days in the Country: And Other Stories by Elizabeth Harrower (Text Publishing)
Screen-Shot-2016-02-04-at-5.37.11-PM-138x210Elizabeth Harrower’s short fiction, gathered for the first time in A Few Days in the Country, is as vibrant today as when it was first published some decades ago. She convincingly depicts a dark and often unacknowledged side of human behaviour: from a glamorous couple who might be termed psychopathic in contemporary times, to petty acts of vindictiveness perpetuated by characters with domestic authority, each story is a glimpse into the way power can work in individual lives. There are also tender tales about the anxieties of friendship and burgeoning adulthood.

This is a superlative collection, written with great clarity and precision and an understanding of the subterranean intensities of human interactions. It gathers together a constellation of stories from a variety of sources, and exhibits the unerring skill of one of Australia’s most significant writers.

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A Guide to Berlin by Gail Jones (Random House)
A-Guide-To-Berlin-138x211A Guide to Berlin pays homage to a great writer, Vladimir Nabokov, whose own fiction provides the title, and to Berlin: a city that is a focus of political and architectural wreckage as well as liberation and civilisation. The novel is both an examination and an enactment of storytelling. A young Australian woman is invited to join a group of international travellers currently living in Berlin. They have a shared interest in the work of Nabokov, and they meet to discuss his writing and to share their own stories.

The stories are varied and intriguing; bringing the politics and experiences of each traveller into sharp conjunction with the others. Gail Jones’s novel is designed with architectural precision, inhabited by illuminating discussions of literature, art and life.

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The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau (Bloomsbury Publishing)
The-World-Without-Us-138x211Set on the north coast of NSW in the aftermath of a young girl’s death from cancer, The World Without Us traces the varying effects of grief on the remaining members of her family while emphasising the wider world in which those lives are embedded: a world in which ecological breakdown operates both as metaphor and disturbing fact. Mireille Juchau uses anxieties about the fragility of the natural systems that sustain our lives as a referent for her story of love and loss.

The World Without Us is an acute portrait of individuals who persist in the aftermath of loss, recorded in prose that is witty and self-aware, and capable of making poetry from the most mundane aspects of the everyday. It is a book that reminds us that a single human loss can fall with terrible force on those who are left behind.

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A Short History of Richard Kline by Amanda Lohrey (Black Inc.)
A-Short-History-of-Richard-Kline-138x211Richard Kline is middle-class, well-educated, well cared for and well paid, but he has suffered his entire life from chronic ennui. Sex, work, therapy, love and parenthood all help for a little while, but the boredom, the emptiness and the sense of suffering always return. When Richard encounters the Indian spiritual guru Sri Mari and is inexplicably moved to tears, he begins to believe in the possibility of fulfilment.

Making the spiritual quest of a self-absorbed, discontented, often smug and self-important man feel relevant and interesting to readers is a big task, but Amanda Lohrey engages from the outset. Her characteristically precise, sometimes startling language and use of a shifting point of view allow the reader to be both within and outside of Richard’s experience, to feel as he does and to think about what that feeling means. The result is a moving, challenging and ultimately unsettling novel, which uses one man’s search for meaning to ask big questions about how to live.

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Anchor Point by Alice Robinson (Affirm Press)
AnchorPoint-138x210Anchor Point is a novel about survival, friendship and family. Laura is just ten years old when her mother disappears and her life becomes complicated and serious. She takes on adult tasks and responsibilities, including caring for her younger sister and helping her father with his struggle to maintain their farm.

Anchor Point is a vehicle for Alice Robinson’s concerns about climate change and the world our children will inherit. Droughts and bushfires are metaphors for the loneliness, confusion and grief that lie in relationships that have gone awry, but there is also a visible love and respect for the Australian landscape in all its changes and this novel contains remarkably observant landscape writing. Robinson’s voice is assured, her prose is crisp and poetic, and the story is executed with care and a light touch.

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The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin)
Screen-Shot-2016-02-04-at-5.45.27-PM-138x187In The Natural Way of Things ten women are imprisoned on an isolated property, forced into hard labour in scorching heat while wearing rough uniforms and vision-impairing bonnets. They are given no reason for their incarceration, but they gradually determine that each has been involved in a public sex scandal, making them dangerous, embarrassing or inconvenient to men who have the power to punish them. As their food runs out and it becomes evident that their guards have also been abandoned by whatever power placed them there, the women are forced to look to each other for survival.

Exposing the threads of misogyny, cowardice and abuses of power embedded in contemporary society, this is a confronting, sometimes deeply painful novel to read. With an unflinching eye and audacious imagination, Charlotte Wood carries us from a nightmare of helplessness and despair to a fantasy of revenge and reckoning.

You can buy this book online at:

*Prices are in Australian dollars and are subject to change by the retailer.

The 2016 Stella Prize shortlist will be announced at 12 noon AEDT on Thursday 10 March, and the 2016 Stella Prize will be awarded in Sydney on the evening of Tuesday 19 April 2016. For more information visit the website www.thestellaprize.com.au

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