Earlier this month, a key commentator said the issue of women writers 'not being taken seriously in this country' was 'solved', and credited the Stella Prize. But Stella’s co-founder disagrees.
abc.net.au/news/stella-prize-shortlist-2023-alice-pung-chair-jaclyn-booton/102220502Earlier this month, The Australian's literary editor Caroline Overington declared the issue of women writers "not being taken seriously in this country" as "solved".
The organisation's flagship initiative is the annual $60,000 Stella Prize for writing by women and non-binary writers. It does seem like more women are sharing their stories than ever before — and that their efforts are being acknowledged by the Stella Prize. In 2018, Alexis Wright became theThere's also been a pronounced shift in the kinds of books nominated. While the early shortlists were dominated by fiction, the most recent have featured poetry, graphic novels and hybrid forms, including works that blend journalism with memoir.
Booton says: "Who is in the room [the judges] is one of the things that affects [the shortlist]: What does original, excellent, engaging mean? The next qualifier, Booton says, is: "Do they bring enough different perspectives and ways of communicating that they will challenge each other and create a really rigorous dialogue?
"We had a poet who was Indigenous, we had two critics, we had an academic, we had a person on our panel who was a disability advocate," Pung says. To assess the works based on the criteria of "excellent, original and engaging", the judges divided up the more than 200 books submitted; each was read by at least two of them, with books deemed "really excellent" read by most if not all of them.
She stresses that the judges did not come to the process of judging the 2023 prize wanting to make any particular statement.By Pung's reckoning, the best books this year just happened to be published by small presses.Big Beautiful Female Theory by Eloise GrillsBad Art Mother by Edwina Preston
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