Stella Prize 2014 longlist announced

Thursday, 13 February 2014 Books+Publishing

The longlist for the second Stella Prize has been announced.

This year’s longlist features six works of fiction and six works of nonfiction. The longlisted titles are:

Letter to George Clooney (Debra Adelaide, Picador)
Moving Among Strangers (Gabrielle Carey, UQP)
Burial Rites (Hannah Kent, Picador)
Night Games (Anna Krien, Black Inc.)
Mullumbimby (Melissa Lucashenko, UQP)
The Night Guest (Fiona McFarlane, Hamish Hamilton)
Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir (Kristina Olsson, UQP)
The Misogyny Factor (Anne Summers, NewSouth)
Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John (Helen Trinca, Text)
The Swan Book (Alexis Wright, Giramondo)
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (Clare Wright, Text)
All the Birds, Singing (Evie Wyld, Vintage).

The shortlist for this year’s prize will be announced on 20 March, ahead of the winner announcement in Sydney on 29 April. The winner of this year’s prize will receive a cash prize of $50,000.

This year’s prize is judged by critic and writer Kerryn Goldsworthy (chair), journalist Annabel Crabb, author Brenda Walker, Avid Reader co-owner Fiona Stager, and writer Tony Birch. Goldsworthy said in a statement that the judges were ‘impressed and excited by the depth of talent in this year’s entries, and every title on the longlist easily meets the formal criteria for the Stella Prize: excellent, engaging and original’.

‘There are five novels, a collection of short stories, plus biography, history, memoir, and several books that defy easy classification,’ said Goldsworthy of the longlist. ‘Most of the fiction, in its different ways, ventures beyond the restrictions of what Patrick White called “dun-coloured realism” into the realms of the quirky, the surreal, the dystopian or the Gothic. Most of the nonfiction titles focus on a particular person but range far beyond that in their implications and themes: in telling one story, they speak for many.’

Chair of the Stella Prize Aviva Tuffield said in the same statement that the longlist ‘yet again demonstrates the high quality and wonderful diversity of writing by Australian women’. ‘We are excited to see such a wealth of nonfiction on this year’s longlist sitting alongside some suburb works of fiction,’ said Tuffield.

The Stella Prize is presented for the best work of fiction or nonfiction by an Australian women published in the previous calendar year. The prize is named after Miles Franklin, whose first name was Stella, and was inspired by the UK Women’s Prize for Fiction, previously known as the Orange Prize for Fiction. The inaugural Stella Prize, presented in 2013, was awarded to Carrie Tiffany for Mateship with Birds (Picador).

To read reviews of some of the longlisted titles, visit Books+Publishing’s Fancy Goods blog here. For more information about the Stella Prize, visit the website here.

Category: Local news