Ahead of the announcement of the 2023 winner on Thursday night, get across the six novels, poetry collections and genre-busting books up for the $60,000 prize
aken together, the books on this year’s Stella shortlist suggest something about the forms of courage at work in Australian women’s writing at the moment: the courage to continue culture in the wake of colonial violence, to take political and personal risks in writing about a repressive regime, to write in the face of death and grief, stigma and taboo.
Many of these stories are concrete moments of memory that do not look away from a violent history, but which are determinedly focused on community and continuance. I emerged from this book grateful to Dank for being willing to share it with us as readers.This is a work of memoir, theory, art history and visual essay, in which Eloise Grills tackles the big question of how women are impacted by how their bodies are seen by others.
In these poems, the devastating, mundane world of the hospital and nursing home takes on a glowing life: the brilliant opening poem envisions the speaker’s father as a giant koi, “guiding the mottled zeppelin / of his body in a single unceasing turn”, surfacing when the nurses bring his dinner. In another, the speaker’s mother is in hospital, listening to David Attenborough, and the ward and the world of his documentary become entangled: “Buzzers / zip and sting like electric / whipbirds.
His sense of disinheritance, and his determination to paint wonky calligraphy all over the city that is painted over, but also sold in art galleries, is used by Lim to think about the city’s past and its heartbreaking recent history of protest and suppression. It is also used to think about Lim’s own position as a journalist and woman who grew up in Hong Kong.
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