Chilling dystopian novel wins 2016 Stella Prize
The 2016 Stella Prize for Australian women’s literature has been won by Charlotte Wood’s dystopian novel where girls who have been involved in sexual scandals find themselves doing hard labour in an isolated outback camp.
Charlotte Wood, author of The Natural Way of Things.
Charlotte Wood’s rage was burning deep inside her and she didn’t know it.
The awakening of her rage happened as she wrote The Natural Way Of Things, the book which has won this year’s $50,000 2016 Stella Prize for Australian women’s literature, awarded last night.
The Natural Way of Things imagines a futuristic dystopian world where girls who have had sexual scandals with powerful men find themselves doing hard labour in a camp.
When the food begins to run out at the institution, the jailers also become the jailed.
Wood says tackling the confronting subject was hard.
“As I started writing about this material a whole lot of really deep rage in me came to the surface that I didn’t know I had,” she told AAP.
“It was about the how women are just routinely degraded and disrespected and it never seems to change.”
Chair of the judging panel Brenda Walker said The Natural Way of Things was a novel “of – and for – our times, explosive yet written with artful, incisive coolness”.
“It parodies, with steely seriousness, the state of being visible and female in contemporary Western society.”
Wood said the initial spark for the concept came from watching a documentary about the notorious Hay Institute for Girls where girls were subjected to militaristic discipline in the 1960s and 1970s.
“While I was writing it I just thought it was very dark and I couldn’t figure out who was going to want to read it to be honest,” Wood said.
Inspired by the past and set in the future, she also drew on present real-world contemporary sex scandals and the treatment of women involved.
“I could keep this really thin thread of wire between this weird imagined world and the real world that we’re living in now,” Wood said.
“The thing that my book has done is draw together all of these different instances and say ‘this is not an aberration, this is what our world is like’.”
The Stella Prize is open to works of fiction and non-fiction by Australian women, with this year’s shortlisted comprising:
Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett Daylight
Hope Farm by Peggy Frew
A Few Days in the Country: And Other Stories by Elizabeth Harrower
The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger by Fiona Wright
– AAP
