Two longlists for big prizes for women’s writing have been announced this week: the Stella Prize (in Australia) and the Women’s Prize for Fiction (in the UK).
The 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist
The Women’s Prize for Fiction was established in 1996 to highlight and remedy the imbalance in coverage, respect and reverence given to women writers versus their male peers. It is awarded annually to the author of the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000.
🏆Hangman by Maya Binyam (One)
🏆In Defence of the Act by Effie Black (époque press)
🏆And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott (Allen & Unwin)
🏆The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
🏆The Maiden by Kate Foster (Mantle)
🏆Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan (Viking)
🏆Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville (Canongate)
🏆Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (Jonathan Cape)
🏆Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy (Faber & Faber)
🏆8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee (Virago)
🏆The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord (Gollancz)
🏆Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Picador)
🏆Nightbloom by Peace Adzo Medie (Oneworld)
🏆Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan (Jonathan Cape)
🏆River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure (Duckworth)
🏆A Trace of Sun by Pam Williams (Legend Press)
The shortlist will be announced on 24 April.
The 2024 Stella Prize longlist
The Stella Prize is a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing. The $60,000 prize is awarded annually to one outstanding book deemed to be original, excellent, and engaging. All genres are eligible.
🏆Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (Giramondo Publishing)
🏆She Is the Earth by Ali Cobby Eckermann (Magabala Books)
🏆Feast by Emily O’Grady (Allen & Unwin)
🏆Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead by Hayley Singer (Upswell Publishing)
🏆The Hummingbird Effect by Kate Mildenhall (Scribner Australia)
🏆Body Friend by Katherine Brabon (Ultimo Press)
🏆The Swift Dark Tide by Katia Ariel (Gazebo Books)
🏆West Girls by Laura Elizabeth Woollett (Scribe Publications)
🏆Graft: Motherhood, Family and a Year on the Land by Maggie MacKellar (Penguin Random House)
🏆Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (University of Queensland Press)
🏆Hospital by Sanya Rushdi (Giramondo Publishing)
🏆The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop (Hachette Australia)
The shortlist will be announced on 4 April.
Reading Matters 
Gosh, there’s an Australian nominated for the Women’s Prize!!!
Have you read it?
PS What clever icons for the dot-points!!
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Yes, surprising to see Kate Grenville on this list. I wasn’t really interested in reading it but may reconsider if it gets shortlisted.
I actually wrote this entirely on my phone (we are on the road, heading to Mornington Peninsula today) and those icons are emojis ☺️
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TBH I am not interested in KG’s ‘indomitable’ female ancestors.
I may have said this before, I went to some festival in Melbourne, maybe a festival of ideas or something like that, not books anyway, round about the time of the Stella fuss when Ann Summers had said at the launch that women needed to write about important things if they wanted recognition, and also round about the time that the climate wars were getting started.
(Well, of course, we can argue about what ‘important things’ might be, but I would say from my reading and my observations that from fiction to history there is mostly still a demarcation between the things that men and women write about.)
Anyway KG was a speaker at this festival, and she said that it was important that writers engage with the important issues of our time, and she mentioned climate change and how writers should be writing about things like that.
Well, *wry frown* unless her granny was a climate change warrior in her day, KG hasn’t taken her own advice. I have been disappointed with her books ever since Sarah Thornhill, but I think I’m more disappointed because my expectations had been raised.
I don’t know any of these authors except Enright, so I’ll be looking out for reviews of these longlisted books.
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Such long lists, and from them, I’ve only – so far – read Soldier Sailor. So I’m in no place to argue about the strength or otherwise of the lists.
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I guess we just have to trust the judges …
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The only book I’ve read of all of these is River East, River West, which I didn’t like 🙂
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Oh no! That doesn’t bode well.
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And a third coming up on Friday: the Carol Shields Prize! Like last year, I’ll be keen to compare the WP and CSP longlists and pick and choose what takes my interest. Alas, the list of Stella names is mostly unfamiliar to me — Stephanie Bishop is the only author I’ve read from before.
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A lot of them are new to me, too, which is why I like this prize… it always unearths some interesting new writers.
Lucachenko is the one to watch… she won the Miles Franklin a few years ago.
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I’m always a bit peevish about these prizes overlapping – only so much longlist and shortlist reading I can do.
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True! But I’ve never really followed the Women’s Prize… 🤷🏻♀️
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Wonderful books, Kim! Thanks for sharing! I’ve heard of only a few writers on the list – Kate Grenville, Anne Enright, Isabella Hammad, Claire Kilroy, Alexis Wright. So many new-to-me beautiful authors to explore!
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Yes, lots of new authors to discover on these lists! That’s the beauty of book prizes… they introduce you to writers you may never have discovered otherwise.
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Yes, very true!
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