Michelle de Kretser has been named the 2025 winner of the Stella Prize for her novel Theory & Practice!
2025 marks the thirteenth year of the Stella Prize celebrating and championing the stories of Australian women and non-binary individuals, and adds de Kretser to the growing list of phenomenal Australian writers that have been recognised by this award.
Until the end of May, you can get Theory & Practice online and in our shops for just $26.99 (was $32.99), so grab a discounted copy of the prize winner while you can!
The winner of the 2025 Stella Prize
Theory & Practice
Michelle de Kretser
In Theory & Practice Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art. It's a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame that makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.
It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students – and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray …
Astrid Edwards, the 2025 Chair of Judges said:
'Theory & Practice is an exceptional novel of hyper realism in which Michelle de Krester, an author at the height of her powers, interrogates the messiness of life found in the gap between theory and practice.'
You can read more of the judges' comments and about the Stella Prize here.
