Stella Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, International Booker among a busy week for prize shortlists
The 2025 Stella Prize shortlist made history this week, with judging chair Astrid Edwards noting that this is the first shortlist in the prize’s 13-year history to be entirely made up of women of colour.
Two New South Wales literary festivals – Words on the Waves and the Rose Scott Women Writers Festival – have released their full programs.
Meanwhile, in awards news, the 2025 shortlists for the ASLA DANZ (Diversity in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand) Children’s Book Award were announced this week; the Australian Book Design Awards 2025 shortlists were also announced; while IBBY Australia nominated author Emily Rodda and illustrator Bruce Whatley as the Australian candidates for the 2026 Hans Christian Andersen Awards.
Further from home, in the UK, the 2025 shortlists for the International Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction were announced; Caroline Criado Perez won the inaugural Unwin Prize, a new UK nonfiction literary award for early-career authors worth £10,000 (A$21,505); and in the US, the winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were revealed.
Two residency programs also revealed their inaugural successful applicants over the last week: the Varuna Trans and Gender Diverse Fellowship; and the Frank Moorhouse Reading Room writing residency.
In local acquisitions news, Fremantle Press acquired world rights to Ningaloo: Australia’s Wild Wonder by Tim Winton, with illustrations by Cindy Lane, in a deal brokered by Jenny Darling of Jenny Darling & Associates; and Allen & Unwin acquired world rights to new nonfiction title Just Saying from author and social psychologist Hugh Mackay.
Overseas, Publishers Weekly reported that, in the context of new US tariffs, ‘at least for now, books have fared well’; while novel-writing nonprofit NaNoWriMo has shuttered in the wake of turbulence – financial and otherwise.
And in sad news closer to home, the industry remembers authors Kerry Greenwood and Andrew Krakouer, who both died recently.
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Category: This week’s news
