Stella Prize 2018 now open

The Stella Prize returns!

The Stella Prize celebrates women’s contribution to literature and has been awarded annually since 2014. The 2018 prize is now open for entries and the winner will receive $50,000.

What is the Stella Prize and how did it come about?

From the website:

“Dreams of the Stella Prize emerged in early 2011 out of a panel that was held at Readings, an independent Melbourne bookstore, on International Women’s Day. The panel was partly a discussion about the underrepresentation of women on the literary pages of the major Australian newspapers, both as reviewers and as authors of the books reviewed….

“After the panel at Readings, a group met to decide what to do next. The original organising committee decided it wanted to do something positive to raise the profile of women writers and address their underrepresentation in the literary world. And thus plans for the Stella Prize were born: a major prize for Australian women writers… The prize would celebrate the best book by an Australian woman, whether fiction or non-fiction, in the previous calendar year. For the prize’s name we reclaimed Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin’s first name for our purposes.”

The prize is open to both fiction and non-fiction writers. So, what are some of the guidelines?

According to the website:

• The Stella Prize is open to books by female-identifying writers who are either Australian citizens or permanent residents of Australia at time of entry.
• To be eligible for entry in the 2018 prize, books must have been first published in English anywhere in the world between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2017.
• Both fiction and non-fiction books are eligible for the prize. This includes novels of all genres, collections of short stories by a single author, memoirs, biographies, histories, verse novels, and novellas of at least 20,000 words. Illustrated books, including graphic novels, are eligible, provided they are accompanied by a substantial quantity of text.

Submissions are now open and will close Friday 29 September 2017.

Read all the guidelines and find out how to enter on the Stella Prize website.