When looking at the list of Australian literary prizes, there are names that even those who are not acquainted with the publishing industry would immediately recognise. The Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize could be considered two of those. The Miles Franklin, established in 1957, finds its prestige in its long history and influence on the Australian literary canon. The Stella Prize, named after the same author and established in 2012, was born as a reactionary response to the Miles Franklin and, in general, to an industry that has primarily favoured male authors as literary prize winners.

Indeed, the year the founders of the Stella Prize sat together to work on a new literary prize exclusively dedicated to women writers (the eligibility criteria were not extended to include non-binary authors until 2019) was the same year the shortlist for the Miles Franklin Award consisted solely of novels written by men. The problem wasn’t the 2011 shortlist alone, but rather the repetition and reinforcement of a longer trend that had been present in Australia and in its literary landscape since the first literary prize was introduced

(Cunningham 2011; Lamond 2011; Dane 2020a).

This fact was further and undeniably confirmed by the 2012 Stella Count, which found that, until then, books written by male authors received a ‘significantly higher proportion’ of rwriterseviews than books written by women (The Stella Count 2012). Beyond acting as an emblem of literary merit, the Stella Prize strives to provide women and non-binary writers with not only critical recognition but also awards ‘significant funds directly to ’ (Stella 2026) to help them towards publishing their next book. In her essay analysing the relationship between literary prizes and public reception, Alexandra Dane (2020b:151) pinpoints that:

[The Stella’s] blatant promotion of ideals that speak directly to one of the primary challenges that women writers in Australia face—that is, financial and temporal precarity—is a radical act in the Australian literary prize sector.

Key Points

• In her essay analysing the relationship between literary prizes and public reception, Alexandra Dane (2020b:151) pinpoints that

• The problem wasn’t the 2011 shortlist alone, but rather the repetition and reinforcement of a longer trend that had been present in Australia and in its literary landscape since the first literary prize was introduced (Cunningham 2011; Lamond 2011; Dane 2020a).

• In her essay analysing the relationship between literary prizes and public reception, Alexandra Dane (2020b:151) pinpoints that: