The Stella Prize longlist 2021
The longlist for this year’s Stella Prize has been announced. This $50,000 prize is awarded for the best work of literature, fiction or non-fiction by an Australian woman published in 2020.
Chair of the 2021 Stella Prize judging panel, Zoya Patel, says: “The 2021 Stella Prize longlist demonstrates the breadth of expression present in Australian literature, and the importance of raising the profile of women and non-binary voices in celebrating this expansive talent. In reading these titles, we pondered what might be lost or overlooked should a prize such as the Stella not exist to specifically examine the output of Australian women and non-binary writers.
In years as uncertain as 2020 and 2021, it is fitting that the Stella Prize longlist includes titles that span the gamut of human enterprise and experience.
This year’s reading presented a diversity of talent and expression, with books exploring people and animals through the lens of fiction and non-fiction, and with a common objective to reach into the heart of what it means to exist in the world today.”
Below are the 12 longlisted books for the 2021 Stella Prize.
Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs
What can whales reveal about our world today? When writer Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beachfront in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales shed light on the condition of our seas. Fathoms blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore: How do whales experience ecological change? Will our connection to these storied animals be transformed by technology? What can observing whales teach us about the complexity, splendour, and fragility of life?
Revenge: Murder in Three Parts by S.L. Lim
A family favour their son over their daughter. Shan attends university before making his fortune in Australia while Yannie must find menial employment and care for her ageing parents. After her mother’s death, Yannie travels to Sydney to become enmeshed in her psychopathic brother’s new life, which she seeks to undermine from within …
This is a novel that rages against capitalism, hetero-supremacy, mothers, fathers, families - the whole damn thing. It’s about what happens when you want to make art but are born in the wrong time and place.
The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay
Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals – first mammals, then birds and insects, too.
Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in that Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.
Witness by Louise Milligan
A masterful and deeply troubling expose, Witness is the culmination of almost five years’ work for award-winning investigative journalist Louise Milligan. Charting the experiences of those who have the courage to come forward and face their abusers in high-profile child abuse and sexual assault cases, Milligan was profoundly shocked by what she found. Witness is a call for change. Milligan exposes the devastating reality of the Australian legal system where truth is never guaranteed and, for victims, justice is often elusive. And even when they get justice, the process is so bruising, they wish they had never tried.
Metal Fish, Falling Snow by Cath Moore
Dylan and her adored French mother dream of one day sailing across the ocean to France. Paris, Dylan imagines, is a place where her black skin won’t make her stand out, a place where she might feel she belongs. But when she loses her mother in a freak accident, Dylan finds herself on a very different journey – a road trip across outback Australia in the care of her mother’s grieving boyfriend, Pat. As they travel through remote towns further and further from the water that Dylan longs for, she and Pat form an unlikely bond. One that will be broken when he leaves her with the family she has never known.
The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha
You’ve grown roots, you’re gathering moss. You’re desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go.
You’re forever wandering, everywhere and nowhere, but where is your home? And where will you choose to go? To New York, to follow your dreams? To Berlin or Amsterdam? Lima or Tijuana? Or onto a train that will never stop? The choices you make about which pages to turn to may mean you’ll become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet many travellers with their own stories to tell. As your paths cross and intertwine, you’ll soon realise that no story is ever new.
Stone Sky Gold Mountain by Mirandi Riwoe
Family circumstances force siblings Ying and Lai Yue to flee their home in China to seek their fortunes in Australia. Life on the gold fields is hard, and they soon abandon the diggings and head to nearby Maytown.
Once there, Lai Yue finds a job as a carrier on an overland expedition, while Ying finds work in a local store and strikes up a friendship with Meriem, a young white woman with her own troubled past. When a serious crime is committed, suspicion falls on all those who are considered outsiders.
Blueberries by Ellena Savage
Blueberries could be described as a collection of essays, the closest term available for a book that resists classification; a blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession that considers a fragmented life, reflecting on what it means to be a woman, a body, an artist. It is both a memoir and an interrogation of memoir. It is a new horizon in storytelling.
In crystalline prose, Ellena Savage explores the essential questions of the examined life - what is it to desire? What is it to accommodate oneself to the world? And at what cost?
Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson
Darnmoor is the home of the Billymil family, three generations who have lived in this ‘gateway town’. Race relations between Indigenous and settler families are fraught, though the rigid status quo is upheld through threats and soft power rather than the overt violence of yesteryear.
As progress marches forwards, Darnmoor and its surrounds undergo rapid social and environmental changes, but as some things change, some stay exactly the same. The Billymil family are watched (and sometimes visited) by ancestral spirits and spirits of the recently deceased, who look out for their descendants and attempt to help them on the right path. When the town’s secrets start to be uncovered the town will be rocked by a violent act that shatters a century of silence.
Smart Ovens for Lonely People by Elizabeth Tan
Conspiracies, memes, and therapies of various efficacy underpin this beguiling short story collection from Elizabeth Tan. In the titular story, a cat-shaped oven tells a depressed woman she doesn’t have to be sorry anymore. A Yourtopia Bespoke Terraria employee becomes paranoid about the mounting coincidences in her life. Four girls gather to celebrate their underwear in ‘Happy Smiling Underwear Girls Party’, a hilarious take-down of saccharine advertisements.
With her trademark wit and slicing social commentary, Elizabeth Tan’s short stories are as funny as they are insightful. This collection cements her role as one of Australia’s most inventive writers.
A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing by Jessie Tu
Jena Lin plays the violin. She was once a child prodigy and now uses sex to fill the void left by fame. She’s struggling a little. Her professional life comprises rehearsals, concerts, auditions and relentless practice; her personal life is spent managing the demands of her strict family and creative friends, and hooking up. And then she meets Mark - much older and worldly-wise - who consumes her. But at what cost to her dreams?
A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing explores female desire and the consequences of wanting too much and never getting it. It is about the awkwardness and pain of being human in an increasingly dislocated world - and how, in spite of all this, we still try to become the person we want to be
The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld
In 1720s Scotland, a priest and his son get lost in the forest, transporting a witch to the coast to stop her from being killed by the village. In the sad, slow years after the Second World War, Ruth finds herself the replacement wife to a recent widower and stepmother to his two young boys, installed in a huge house by the sea and haunted by those who have come before.
Fifty years later, Viv is cataloguing the valuables left in her dead grandmother’s seaside home, when she uncovers long-held secrets of the great house. Three women, hundreds of years apart, slip into each other’s lives in a novel of darkness, violence and madness.
