When Heather Rose found out she had won the $50,000 Stella Prize for Australian women and non-binary writers in 2017, she celebrated by taking a bottle of champagne to the beach with her friends in Hobart.
"We lit firecrackers, we lit sparklers and danced around being quite silly," she recalls.
"I was completely speechless when they rang me to tell me that I had won … I was so stunned by it."
The Tasmanian author won for her novel The Museum of Modern Love, about a man who returns repeatedly to New York's Museum of Modern Art to see performance artist Marina Abramović.
It went on to win the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and has also been adapted into a play, which premiered at Sydney Festival this year.
Even after five novels, including 2019's Bruny – and three books for younger readers, co-written with Danielle Wood – Rose admits now that she still loses confidence in herself as a writer; she has a post-it note attached to her computer that reads: "I do know how to do this."
The Stella Prize validated her work, introducing her to a readership beyond her "wonderful Tasmanian audience".
"[Before the Stella Prize] I didn't get invited to festivals. And I just didn't have a chance to promote my literature in the way that might have happened in another paradigm," she says.
The history of the Stella Prize
In 2012, a group of women working in the book industry founded the Stella in response to the underrepresentation of women in local literary prizes and book reviews in major newspapers.
Co-founder Chris Gordon, programming manager at Melbourne bookshop Readings, recalls the group of women getting together for a drink after a 2011 International Women's Day panel discussion about the underrepresentation of women in Australian literary culture.
The panel, chaired by Kill Your Darlings literary journal co-founder Rebecca Starford, featured novelist Sophie Cunningham, Sleepers Publishing co-founder Louise Swinn, and writer and The Age columnist Monica Dux. All four went on to start the Stella Prize.
"We were enormously cross … Over a couple of bevvies, we realised that we needed to do something more," says Gordon.
From there, an expanding group of women – also including Jo Case (currently deputy editor, Books and Ideas at the Conversation) and editor and publisher Aviva Tuffield – met regularly to brainstorm the prize.
And it did change the lives of Australian women authors.
Journalist Jess Hill, who won the Stella in 2020, after spending four years writing her book about domestic abuse, See What You Made Me Do, says: "Just the prize money alone, it changed our lives.
"It made it feel like I did not f*** up our lives writing this book."
A rocky start
Charlotte Wood had already published five novels – and been shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the Christina Stead Prize – by the time she won the Stella in 2016 for The Natural Way of Things, a dystopian novel about a group of young women held captive in remote Australia.
She admits to having initial misgivings about the prize.
"I was a little dubious way back when they were first talking about it, because I didn't like the idea of having separate little prizes for women that were apart from the real prizes – which were the ones that were won by men," she says.
Her opinion was shared by the wider literary community.
Carrie Tiffany, who won the inaugural Stella Prize for Mateship with Birds, recalls: "There was a sense from the literary community that some people were threatened by the Stella and resented it."
An editorial published in The Age the week of her win asked: "Does Stella mean stellar?"
It went on: "Is it necessary or desirable to have a literary prize exclusively for women? Does this form of discrimination really encourage more female writers to step forward with their work?"
Tiffany says: "I was hurt when I read it."
She also recalls being described as a "Mitcham mum of two", and her novel as a "bush romance" in news headlines.
In interviews, she found herself defending the prize's existence rather than talking about her novel.
"That was disappointing, because when a man wins a literary prize, they can just talk about their book."
Later that year, she won the Christina Stead Prize for Mateship with Birds, beating out Frank Moorhouse and Murray Bail.
"I did feel after that a sort of sense of vindication," she says.
Wood's uncertainty about the prize was short-lived.
"My opinion changed absolutely and really quickly because of the way that the Stella Prize organising committee went about creating this incredibly high-profile, prestigious prize, and the associated activities that went along with it.
"All my doubts about it went away."
The Stella Count
Beyond the prize, the Stella Count tracks the amount of reviews written by and about Australian women writers.
According to the 2019 and 2020 Stella Counts – conducted by researchers from Monash University and Australian National University, and released earlier this month – representation of women authors in Australian book reviews now exceeds that of male writers.
In 2019, 53 per cent of books reviewed were by women; with that number rising to 55 per cent in 2020.
It is the first time that equal attention between male and women writers has been reached since the Stella Count was started in 2012.
In both 2019 and 2020, nine of 12 publications surveyed reviewed the same number or more books by women than by men.
Stella also actively campaigns for more local women authors in school curriculums.
"[The Stella does] very good work in the world on a very collective level and a community level rather than just being about one glittering prize for an individual," says 2014 winner Clare Wright.
The Stella bump
The life-changing effects of the Stella can be seen in the immediate increase in book sales that follow the prize's announcement.
Sales of the nine Stella Prize winners' books rose by 875 per cent on average in the week after winning, according to Nielsen BookScan data supplied to The Guardian.
For Wright's The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, a work of history that uncovered the role of women in the Eureka Stockade, sales grew by more than 1,800 per cent.
She says staff from her publisher had to drive boxes of her books to shops to meet demand.
"Things just exploded within the next 24 hours [after winning the Stella]," she says.
Chris Gordon explains: "One of the great success stories of the Stella Prize was that very quickly, if you became shortlisted for the Stella Prize, or you won the Stella Prize, your book was guaranteed to sell copies. That happened immediately."
That success has had flow-on effects for authors beyond the financial return.
Gordon says that the recognition of a prize like the Stella can encourage publishers to give authors better deals or larger advances.
"And that author then gets invited to writers' festivals, where you get paid; gets asked to do school tours where you can get paid.
"It allows an author to make a career out of writing."
On average, Australian writers earn just $13,000 a year from their creative work.
Winning the Stella meant Heather Rose could finally afford to focus on her writing full-time after years spent juggling her creative work with raising a family and her day job in advertising.
The result was the novel Bruny, which went on to win General Fiction Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards in 2020.
"It [writing Bruny] would never have happened without both the encouragement and the financial largesse of the Stella Prize," she says.
Emily Bitto's debut novel The Strays won the Stella in 2015 – but that early-career acknowledgment didn't lead to her writing full-time.
The Strays is the story of a working-class teenager who becomes a part of a bohemian artist's makeshift family in 1930s Melbourne.
In the same year as she released the book, Bitto also opened a bar in Melbourne's Carlton, Heartattack and Vine.
"I was very, very busy and not actually writing at that point, and I didn't really get to write again for like another year after winning the prize – because of the commitments of the business." she says.
The Strays was then sold to overseas markets and optioned as a TV series.
Winning the Stella also gave Bitto the confidence to start on her next novel, Wild Abandon, which was released last year.
"It's really hard to make that transition from debut to early-career writer, let alone to established writer. It did give me this sense of comfort and confidence to know that it would be a lot easier to get a publishing deal for the second book after winning the Stella."
Literary legitimacy
Clare Wright is an academic at La Trobe University, and she says winning the Stella was invaluable to her burgeoning career as an author.
Like Bitto's novel, Forgotten Rebels was optioned for TV – it will be turned into a 10-part drama, with Wright on board as a writer and producer.
A version of Forgotten Rebels for younger readers was released in 2015. Text Publishing also acquired the rights to her earlier work, Beyond the Ladies Lounge.
Winning the Stella drew a whole new readership to Wright's work – with the Stella giving the book a 'literary' legitimacy, beyond a purely historical or academic one.
"Hannah Kent was in the shortlist that year, [and] Alexis Wright; people who I was absolutely in awe of as writers. To be keeping that sort of company means that people start to look at your writing differently."
But she points out that while writing prizes may be a boon for winners, they don't work to structurally change the conditions under which writers work.
"[Writers are] underpaid, undervalued and often exploited by a range of other cultural institutions, including universities … There are structural and systemic changes that need to happen for those problems to be addressed."
Barriers to women's participation
One of the key barriers for women writers is juggling their creative life with their domestic responsibilities.
Almost half of respondents in a 2021 study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies said that women in opposite-sex couples always or usually do household tasks, compared to 10 per cent who said that work was always or usually done by men.
Jess Hill says: "I wrote my book when I had a newborn [and] just getting half an hour to write two paragraphs would require military-esque strategies.
"I've written everywhere from the front seat of a car to the side of a road to a park bench, wherever I could possibly find a moment to write."
On top of the material concerns of paid and unpaid labour, there are also symbolic barriers to women's participation.
Emily Bitto, who teaches creative writing, has noticed that her male students are more comfortable owning the label of 'writer' than women.
"They will say I want to be a writer and they will call themselves a writer, whereas young female writers will tend to say, 'I just enjoy writing, I don't necessarily think I'm very good at it.'"
Bitto can relate: "I didn't feel confident putting 'writer' down on forms, or when people asked me what I did, saying that I was a writer, until probably long after my first book came out."
Vicki Laveau-Harvie won the Stella in 2019 at the age of 76 for her memoir (and first book) The Erratics.
It also won the Finch Memoir Prize in 2018, and was published by the small press Finch Publishing. The publisher shut down at the end of that year when its owner retired – taking Laveau-Harvie's memoir out of print.
After it was longlisted for the Stella, The Erratics gained a second life with Fourth Estate.
"The Finch Prize put the book in print. And then after that, the Stella Prize kind of launched it a little bit into the wider public," she says.
She told ABC Arts when she won the Stella: "When I came through university, I was studying dead white males basically … and I just don't think I saw [a career in writing] as a possibility."
"To have that [be] very different now for young writers, I think, is partly due to the Stella."
Valuing a woman's time
The Stella acknowledges the value of women's time by paying authors for their participation in publicity and events – which is unusual for Australian prizes.
Evie Wyld, who won the Stella in 2021 for The Bass Rock, says: "Without wanting to be twee about it, it [the Stella] does feel like a family sort of thing. You get so much support right from the word go … [They ask,] 'How can we help you work more? How can we support you?'"
When Wyld won, the UK – where the British Australian author lives – had just emerged from a three-month lockdown.
She told ABC Arts at the time: "There's such a nice feeling of validation after a year where I've had so little time [to write] because of child care and homeschooling and all the domestic stuff."
Looking back a year later, she says: "You could just feel writing and work getting further and further away … I was in a kind of stasis – and winning the Stella really kicked me out of that and woke me up to the importance of female voices in any situation."
The Stella supports longlisted, shortlisted and winning authors through initiatives like writers' residencies and workshops – now held at a 20-acre estate in the Southern Highlands of NSW.
These retreats offer writers a dedicated period of time and a space in which to focus on their work.
On the day she spoke to ABC Arts, Wyld found out that Stella would be funding her participation in a writing retreat.
"All I need is somewhere quiet. Maybe I'll even use it to just get a desk somewhere for a week or so, where I can't be contacted," she says.
"Even though I won the prize a little while ago, they [the Stella] keep on supporting [me]," she says.
And the encouragement and acknowledgement of Stella goes beyond the financial and the practical.
More than a prize
From the get-go, Stella has generated what Clare Wright describes as a "communal spirit".
In 2013, Carrie Tiffany gave away $10,000 of her Stella Prize money to be distributed among the shortlisted authors.
In 2014, when she won, Wright donated $2,500 to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, and another $2,500 to Northcote High School in Victoria, for the establishment of a women's history prize.
That year, the Stella instituted a $2,000 sum for authors on the shortlist, and in 2018, they started awarding $1,000 to those on the longlist.
She purchased a signed, first edition copy of All That Swagger by Miles Franklin (whose first name gives the prize its title) to be signed and passed around by the winners of the Stella, as an ongoing record of women's writing in Australia.
Heather Rose recalls passing the book on to Alexis Wright in Sydney in 2018 – even as she was gripped by a bout of food poisoning.
"By the time I arrived at the ceremony, I had to keep running to the bathroom to vomit. But I managed to stay long enough to give Alexis the book.
"I remember when Charlotte handed it to me down in Melbourne; it was really precious."
Stella so white
In her speech after winning the prize in 2018, Alexis Wright celebrated the shortlist as reflecting "exciting, diverse voices in the world of Australian letters".
A member of the Waanyi Nation, Wright won the Stella for Tracker, a "collective memoir" of Arrente activist Tracker Tilmouth.
She was not available to speak to ABC Arts for this article as she was working on her anticipated new novel, Praiseworthy, which is due to be released this October.
In 2019, she reflected: "To see a book like Tracker, very much an Indigenous story, win a prize like the Stella, I think that's a very positive thing for our communities."
Wright's book drew upon Aboriginal methods of storytelling, including ideas of consensus and collaboration.
In her acceptance speech, she said: "I am grateful for the storytelling skills of our culture and carried them into the book, which allowed, as Tracker himself wanted, everyone to speak for themselves, to tell their own part in the story."
The Stella shortlist in 2018 also included Noongar woman Claire G. Coleman (Terra Nullius), Sri Lankan Australian Michelle de Kretser (The Life to Come), and Iranian Australian Shokoofeh Azar (The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree).
"A literary dialogue that allows us to have greater knowledge and understanding of each other, and acceptance of difference, and respect for each other in our diversity, is what will make Australian literature truly marvellous, relevant, and far stronger than it has ever been."
While Stella shortlists have usually included writers of colour, including de Kretser, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Melissa Lucashenko, Wright is the only woman of colour – and the only Aboriginal woman – to win so far.
This year, ten of 12 authors longlisted are writers of colour, including five Aboriginal authors: Evelyn Araluen (Dropbear), Anita Heiss (Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray), S.J. Norman (Permafrost), Elfie Shiosaki (Homecoming) and Chelsea Watego (Another Day in the Colony).
In 2021, S.L. Lim was the first non-binary person to be longlisted – and then shortlisted –since the prize amended their eligibility guidelines to include trans and non-binary writers in August 2019 (non-binary Mununjali Yugambeh author Ellen van Neerven was long- and shortlisted in 2015). This year, S.J. Norman, a writer of Wiradjuri descent, became the third non-binary author to be longlisted for the Stella.
This may indicate a shift in the kinds of voices that are acknowledged by the prize.
Reckoning with racist legacies
Recently, critics have pointed to the Stella Prize's name as an example of racist legacies in Australian literary culture. Miles Franklin was a member of a fascist movement in Australia during WWII.
In 2020, writer and editor Alison Croggon tweeted: "Beginning to think we don't talk enough about how Miles Franklin, icon of Australian literature, was an actual fascist."
"Maybe it's worth reflecting on the legacy of white supremacy in our national literature. Because it seems that we don't," she continued.
In response, the Stella tweeted that they were committed to taking the time to "reflect on our namesake".
"For too long, we've unquestioningly bought into the legacy of 'iconic' Australian writers. That needs to change."
They wrote that they would "educat[e] themselves" by reading Miles Franklin: A Short Biography by Jill Roe and Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and would revisit Franklin's work with a critical eye.
"We know anti-racism is central to an ethical feminism," the Stella wrote.
But the name remains.
In a recent statement provided to ABC Arts, Stella executive director Jaclyn Booton wrote:
"We have considered Stella's name and consulted with a range of people from across the literary, academic, and philanthropic sectors on what a change might mean. It's not a decision we would ever take lightly, nor dismiss out of hand.
While we are proud of our work celebrating Australian women and non-binary writers, we know gender is only one part of a complex conversation about representation and participation in the Australian literary sector.
Deeply entrenched connections between literature, racism, and power are being challenged, thanks in no small part to the work of First Nations people and writers of colour. Stella is committed to amplifying the voices of these writers – many of whom can be found in our 2022 Stella Prize longlist."
Reflecting the time and the place
The books on the Stella Prize's 2022 longlist include a provocative debut poetry collection by Araluen, a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation; Jennifer Down's expansive novel exploring the lifelong impact of child abuse, Bodies of Light; and Randa Abdel-Fattah's non-fiction book about the impact of the current political climate on a generation of young people, Coming of Age in the War on Terror.
Chair of the 2022 judging panel Melissa Lucashenko wrote in the judges' report: "Australian women and non-binary writers are producing innovative, sophisticated literature in very difficult times."
Jess Hill says that all Stella authors – whether longlisted, shortlisted, or the winner – contribute to the oeuvre of Australian women's writing.
"There's this sense of how our writing feeds off each other's; this sense of progression," she says.
She adds that prize lists of any year reflect Australian culture today: "A lot of it has got to do with the zeitgeist."
Winning the Stella turned Hill's subject matter – domestic abuse and coercive control, which dominated the headlines in 2020 in the wake of the February murder of Hannah Clarke – into a subject that all Australians should know about.
"It became a book that was of national interest," she says.
See What You Made Me Do was adapted for TV by SBS in 2021.
"The work of educating people on coercive control, on having people understand what it's like to be a victim or a perpetrator or go through the justice system, that has been advanced incredibly by the Stella Prize."
Pressure on other prizes
When Chris Gordon and the other co-founders began working on the Stella in 2011, a woman had only won the Miles Franklin Literary Award a total of 13 times since its first year in 1957 – including four wins for Thea Astley.
In 2011, the shortlist was all-male.
"I do remember thinking, 'Gosh, can we not really find one fabulous book by a female writer to be on that list?'" says Carrie Tiffany.
But in 2013, the year after the Stella launched, the Miles Franklin shortlist was all women.
And nine of the last 10 winners of the Miles Franklin Award have been women, including last year's winner Amanda Lohrey, Tara June Winch, de Kretser (twice) and 2021 Stella winner Evie Wyld.
Charlotte Wood puts that shift down to other major prizes finally recognising a kind of "unconscious bias".
"Women didn't suddenly just start writing good books," she says.
"It's [the Stella has] normalised women winning prizes. In fact, now it sort of seems to be more surprising if a man wins a major prize."
Tiffany adds: "I think it'll be a good year when the Stella winner goes on to win the Miles Franklin."
Moving forward
Jess Hill believes that the situation for women writers in Australia has improved thanks to the efforts of the Stella.
"We don't have as much trouble getting reviewed anymore. We don't have as much trouble getting on the shelf anymore, on the prominent shelves," she says.
It does feel like a boom period for writing by Australian women and non-binary writers, who took out the top prizes at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards in February (Veronica Gorrie for her memoir Black and Blue), the Prime Minister's Literary Awards in December (Amanda Lohrey for The Labyrinth), and at last year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards (Ellen van Neerven for Throat).
Heather Rose says: "It's almost like we've broken down with the Stella some of that belief structure – that great writing is written by men," she says.
"One of the most beautiful things that I see with the Stella is it inspires young women to try their hand at writing; to believe in themselves."
Chris Gordon says: "Until [women's] stories, those domestic stories, stories of women navigating the world are part of our national and international narratives, change is not going to be possible.
"Until there's that bloody systematic change in our politics, in our CEOs, in the way that all women are treated across the world, there's always going to need to be prizes that recognise women's work."
Charlotte Wood believes the Stella Prize "will always be needed to keep the other prizes honest and to keep Australia literature [that has been written by women] flourishing in school rooms and classrooms".
"We've seen so often that the gains that women make, as soon as attention stops being paid to really maintaining those gains, they lose the territory again … I can easily imagine a slow or fast slipping away of the focus on women's writing," she says.
