The Stella Prize has recently announced their Stella Sparks campaign, which celebrates writing by Australian women. A Stella Spark is the book by an Australian woman that struck a spark for you, igniting ideas, creativity and a passion for great writing. You can find out more about this fantastic campaign here.

Here, our staff share their own Stella Sparks.

My Stella Spark is Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air. I read this when I was about 19 and it spoke to me as no other Australian novel had before, giving a me a glimpse into how it might be possible to speak truly and beautifully of youth, place and a searching spirit. – Jess Au, Bookseller at St Kilda

When I was a credulous teenager I read passionate love stories full of high romance, and chilling horror stories about other angst-ridden teens. However, the tenor of my reading changed dramatically when I was 15, and my history teacher gave me her copy of Anne Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police. Bang, bang. Reading the history of Australian women changed everything for me. I was struck by a terrible comprehension – with knowledge comes responsibility, with anger comes action, and with empathy comes humanity. Anne Summers gave me feminism. – Chris Gordon, Event Manager

Monkey Grip provided the spark for me. I’d been a bookseller for a year when this gutsy, brilliant novel burst on the scene in 1977. The story wasn’t about some remote place or people I had little in common with – it was about a world I could identify with. The book was brave and brazen with beautiful writing, and it had everybody talking. Australia wasn’t boring anymore. And now, almost 40 years later, Monkey Grip still sells and resonates with new generations of readers. – Mark Rubbo, Managing Director

Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar is a debut Australian novel full of heart and atmosphere. Every time I read it I feel completely immersed in Carly’s story, while still being able to appreciate how great the writing is. I’m a sinker not a swimmer, but I love being transported to Sydney’s beautiful northern beaches and hearing what it’s like being a young woman in a surfing lineup. Carly is a wonderfully tough character, and it’s a pleasure to read such a realistic portrayal of someone who has been hurt learning to trust again. – Leanne Hall, Grants Officer for the Readings Foundation

Krissy Kneen’s Steeplechase is a dramatic and accomplished fever-dream of a novel, and its haunting plot and vivid imagery has lasted in my mind in a way that few others do. It’s about repressed memory and madness, sex and art, sisters and mothers, the claustrophobia of open spaces and the stifling intensity of cities. Kneen’s writing is elemental and corporeal, and Steeplechase explores an embodied psychological experience in a way that is darkly feminine and exquisitely intense. For me, this novel re-defined Australian Gothic in a contemporary context. It has shadows of Elizabeth Jolley, Julia Leigh, and even Jessica Anderson, but is entirely singular in its sharp application of the gothic genre. This novel feels less like a spark than a series of bright flashes, pulsing across my mind – and it has done so frequently since I read it three years ago. – Amy Vuleta, Shop Manager at St Kilda

Growing up in a quiet, leafy and very safe suburb of Sydney, the notion of a world outside of my immediate surroundings was somewhat alien to me at 15. Robyn Davidson’s Tracks is responsible for opening my eyes to a much wider world. Reading about the author’s epic journey through the Australian outback on a camel struck a chord that continues to resonate with me as I journey through life today. Tracks was the first book to open up the possibility of reading for pleasure, rather than reading being a chore associated with school. – Anthony Shaw, Project Manager

Mandy Ord’s Sensitive Creatures was a quiet revelation for me. Here was a comic about the city I lived in, narrated by a character I could relate to – it was something I had never really encountered before. This story is funny, touching and smart, plus it’s also really well drawn. – Tam Patton, Music Specialist

These days I’m a big fan of Catherine Jinks’s books for children, but I actually first fell in love with her writing when I read her adult thriller, The Road. This is a fantastically tense and creepy horror story that draws from the dreamtime stories of Aboriginal culture. At the time of reading this story, I was living in an isolated area of North West QLD where indigenous culture was part of my daily life. It is a huge and oft neglected part of our nation’s history and I loved seeing it reflected back in a book. – Dani Solomon, Children’s Specialist at Carlton

My Stella Spark is Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day. This short, enigmatic novel is a ghost story, a story of friendship, and a story of Australia at another time. The novel is about death, secrets and growing up. It is like nothing you have ever read before. The Golden Day offers the reader extraordinary access to the child’s world. – Mike Shuttleworth, Children’s Specialist at Hawthorn

My first thought was Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. This massive tome changed the way I thought about cookbooks – for one thing it contained so much more than just recipes. To me, it was the perfect guide for navigating the world of Australian food ingredient by ingredient, and showed me how to buy, how to store and prepare, and more. But this creative inspiration does revolve around what I eat, as opposed to what I read…

So, my very close second thought was The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper. I was a lifelong fiction reader prior to picking this up on a recommendation. I expected to be informed about events that were largely unknown to me, and that was about it. But, oh my! Chloe Hooper’s skilful storytelling meant I was utterly gripped from beginning to end. The events recounted are shocking and deeply sad, yet this book is remarkable for its intelligent and clear-eyed portrayal. I recommend this book to friends all the time as I think everyone should hear this story in the way Hooper tells it. – Jan Lockwood, Human Resources Manager

Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven. Speculative, ancient, urgent, and sometimes even erotic. This brilliant young writer is making serious waves, and her Australia is both sensuous and uncompromising, searching and yet fully grounded. ‘Pearl’, the first story, will stick with you forever. – Neika Lehman, Bookseller at St Kilda

Gwen Harwood was probably the first Australian poet whose work I really connected with. I studied several of her Selected Poems in high school, and her lyrical but understated writing combining the mythical and the domestic spoke to me in a way I’d not experienced before. I still remember my visceral reaction to her depiction of childhood terror in ‘The Glass Jar’, and Harwood’s beautifully restrained writing about suburban Brisbane probably played a small role in my moving there after high school. The line, ‘the melting west is striped like icecream’ from ‘The Violets’ has never really left me. – Alan Vaarwerk, Editorial Assistant for the Readings Monthly

June Factor’s Far Out, Brussel Sprout! holds a very special place in my heart. When I was six I dubbed it ‘The Best Book Ever’. Every day our teacher read out one of the poems inside, and we cackled with laughter at the funny bits, and groaned in disgust at the gross bits. And they were seriously gross:

Ooey gooey custard, green maggot pie
Four dog’s gizzards and one cat’s eye.

When you’re six, it doesn’t get any better than that! Everybody in the class loved Far Out, Brussel Sprout!, from the dedicated bookworms to the most reluctant readers. There was wait list pages long to check it out from the library, which amazes me now. It’s quite a feat to get a class full of kids fighting each other to read poetry. – Holly Harper, Children’s Specialist at Carlton

One of the first books I was ever exposed to as a child was Ruth Park’s wonderful and often overlooked The Muddle-Headed Wombat. Good natured and humorous with none of the switch beatings of Blinky Bill or weird semi-cannibalism of Magic Pudding it’s always been my go-to when people have asked me for a recommendation of an Australian children’s classic.

When I was older I rediscovered Ruth Park in the pages of Playing Beattie Bow. Trips to The Rocks in Sydney were a regular feature of my childhood, and it was easy to imagine the ghost of Beattie creeping through the narrow alleyways and steep sandstone steps. Having grown up in Canberra the visibility and immediacy of what felt like such a distant past (a hundred years!) was exotic and exciting. Ruth Park’s lesser-known My Sister Sif is still one of my favourite books, and my battered hardback edition (still embellished with a ‘This Book Belongs to Lian’ teddy bear book plate) sits proudly on my grown-up book shelves. My Sister Sif was one of the first books I read that introduced me to the mythology and legends outside of the western tradition. – Lian Hingee, Digital Marketing Manager

As I get older and angrier I’ve come to find that the writing I most enjoy are things that attempt to be new, books that push a little further out into uncharted water. I was once at a talk where someone said: ‘Why write what’s already been said?’. Although I’ve forgotten who said this and why, it’s kind of stuck with me. When talking about Heat and Light a lot of people mention Ellen van Neerven’s youth, possibly because the surefooted tone of her stories are so surprising. Weird things happen too: people are fly away in storms, men are eaten by tigers. Another enjoyably weird book is Krissy Kneen’s The Adventures of Holly White, which again pushes you, not so gently, into its strange world of erotic fiction. While it’s easy to look at the past for inspiration, it’s more contemporary books that I find spurring me onward. – Chris Somerville, Online Team Member

Australian women have been enriching my reading life for as long as I can remember. My Stella Sparks include Robin Klein (Games, Laurie Loved Me Best) and Margaret Clark (Back on Track, Fat Chance) for drawing me into the world of teenage girlhood well before I was a teenager; Melina Marchetta (Looking for Alibrandi) and Isobelle Carmody (the Obernewtyn chronicles) for getting me through my teen years; Elizabeth Jolley (The Well) for showing me how intriguingly weird Australian fiction can be; Helen Garner (Joe Cinque’s Consolation) for true crime; Anna Krien (Night Games) for sports writing; Alice Pung (Unpolished Gem), Rebecca Starford (Bad Behaviour) and Fiona Wright (Small Acts of Disappearance) for memoir; and Eliza Henry-Jones (In the Quiet), Peggy Frew (Hope Farm) and Abigail Ulman (Hot Little Hands) for contemporary fiction that makes me appreciate how full of talent the current literary landscape is. – Nina Kenwood, Marketing Manager

Romy Ash’s Floundering completely knocked me about – a remarkable debut novel that skilfully navigates a child’s perspective in a fresh, unsentimental way. Ash is a master at writing characters that jump off the page. Floundering tells the story of a ‘bad’ mother, Loretta, who returns to collect her young sons, Tom and Jordy, from their grandparents. She loads them into her beat-up yellow car and heads across the Nullarbor to a caravan park on the West coast. Their journey is harrowing and suspenseful, and 11-year-old Tom has a limited understanding of adults, which makes his voice all the more compelling.

From my childhood, it’s hard to go past Robin Klein’s Hating Alison Ashley (responsible for my favourite Australian character of all-time, the incomparable Erica Yurken), or Jacyln Moriarty’s Feeling Sorry for Celia, a book composed of a series of letters that made me laugh until I cried, on multiple occasions. – Stella Charls, Marketing and Event Coordinator

My Stella Spark is The Delinquents by Criena Rohan. Like many of my generation, I read this as a teenager in the late 1980s when it was made into a rather average film starring Kylie Minogue. Rohan’s tough, unsentimental view of young adult lives on the margins in seedy inner suburban 1950s Brisbane immediately gripped me, and had Rohan lived longer (she died in 1963, the year after The Delinquents was published) who knows how much her reputation would have soared? – Kate O'Mara, Bookseller at Hawthorn

I wanted to take a piece of Melbourne with me on a recent trip abroad so Anna George’s What Came Before got the nod. A thoroughly entertaining, un-put-downable psychological thriller. I hope someone in Spain is reading it right this minute! – Judi Mitchell, Customer Service Officer

I’m lucky enough to count several Stella Sparks in my reading life. To share one memorable and recent example: Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals was a lightning bolt moment for me. This playful, smart, ambitious collection of stories reminded me why I fell in love with fiction in the first place: for its ability to expose truths, and to empathise deeply with humanity. – Bronte Coates, Digital Content Coordinator

The Stella Prize is a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing, and championing diversity and cultural change. Find out more here.