The Inaugural Stella Prize to be awarded in April 2013
The team behind
The Stella Prize is Australia’s first major literary prize for women’s writing, designed to celebrate and recognise Australian women’s writing, encourage a future generation of women writers, and significantly increase the readership for books by women.
The prize will be awarded to the best work of literature published in 2012 by an Australian woman and interestingly, is open to fiction or non-fiction.
Author Helen Garner, an official ambassador of The Stella Prize, is just one writer whose work hovers on the increasingly permeable boundary between fiction and non-fiction.
She says, ‘I hope The Stella Prize, with its graceful flexibility about genre, will encourage women writers to work in the forms they feel truly at home in, instead of having to squeeze themselves into the old traditional corsets.’
), The Stella Prize is named for Stella Maria Miles Franklin, the iconic Australian feminist and author, who established the prestigious
from a bequest in her will to reward and encourage Australian writing.
‘We’re very pleased to be announcing The Stella Prize in the week of Miles Franklin’s birthday,’ says Aviva Tuffield, chair of The Stella Prize.
The winner will be decided by a panel of judges, chaired by respected critic and writer Kerryn Goldsworthy and comprising Kate Grenville (author), Claudia Karvan (actor), Fiona Stager (co-owner of Avid Reader bookstore and immediate past president of the Australian Booksellers’ Association) and Rafael Epstein (ABC broadcaster).
Entries are open from now until Thursday 15 November. More information including guidelines and entry forms are available from
