Stella Prize 2020: a readers' guide to the contenders

The shortlist for this year’s Stella Prize includes books about courage, strength, compassion and love – all of which we need now, more than ever.

Six books that shock, delve deeply and destroy pieties

Young people – how they think and feel, and how families, schools, clinics and courts fail them – are a recurring theme in the six surprising and daring books shortlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize, writes Camilla Nelson.

Alexis Wright, author of Tracker: a book written in the mode of Aboriginal storytelling. Photo: Stella Prize

Alexis Wright wins Stella Prize for epic Aboriginal story

Alexis Wright has won the 2018 Stella Prize with ‘Tracker: Stories of Tracker Tilmouth’ – a work she describes as her attempt to tell an ‘impossible story’ using the voices of many people to reflect on the life of a visionary figure in Aboriginal politics.

Unflinching and luminous, Stella shortlist gets under your skin

Tasmanian writer Heather Rose has won the 2017 Stella Prize for ‘The Museum of Modern Love’ – one of six remarkable shortlisted books that Camilla Nelson says engage the heart and brain.

Charlotte Wood: Reasons to write

Stella Prize-winning author Charlotte Wood admits that at times she thought about giving up writing her “dark, bleak” novel The Natural Way of Things.

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.