Latest news with #AmyMcQuire
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Michelle de Kretser wins Stella prize for book that ‘expands our notions of what a novel can be'
'I wouldn't say I set out to break forms, as to invent new ones,' Michelle de Kretser says of her novel Theory and Practice, winner of the $60,000 Stella prize for women and non-binary writers. 'I wanted to write a novel where the reader thinks it isn't a novel because I'm using nonfictional devices and forms.' Tricksy and sly, Theory and Practice – the Australian author's eighth novel – troubles the line between fiction and memoir. It opens with several pages of another ostensibly unrelated novel that is abandoned in its early stages; the reader simply turns a page and is confronted with the line: 'At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.' What comes after seems suspiciously like memoir – particularly to anyone vaguely familiar with de Kretser's biography – following a young Sri Lankan-Australian woman studying English literature at Melbourne University in the 1980s. The Stella prize judges called it 'a brilliantly auto-fictive knot' and 'a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living,' awarding it among a shortlist that included Amy McQuire's essay collection Black Witness, Melanie Cheng's novel The Burrow and Samah Sabawi's family memoir Cactus Pear For My Beloved. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Theory and Practice is also disarmingly quotidian, relatable – and funny. The protagonist drinks cheap wine, goes to parties and watches recondite arthouse films, falls in love and avoids her mother. But de Kretser is playing a complicated and penetrating game with the reader, provoking questions around the concept of mimesis, or the representation of reality. 'I would say about 80 to 85% of my novel is fiction,' says the author. While she did attend Melbourne University in the 1980s, she didn't study English literature; nor did she undertake a thesis on Virginia Woolf, as her protagonist does. 'That's one of the things the novel is saying: don't confuse the representation of reality with reality,' de Kretser says. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Theory and Practice also has a lot to say about legacy, about the things we inherit and the things we reject from our forebears, familial and literary. While Woolf remains an important feminist figure, she had a patrician view of class and could be quite racist, with an uncomfortably colonialist outlook on the world. The protagonist dubs her 'the Woolfmother', and she exerts a problematic influence second only to the character's own mother, who sends passive-aggressive letters to her daughter throughout. 'When you think about feminism, you think of course about mothers and daughters because that's the maternal line, it's the maternal legacy,' says de Kretser. The process of maturation is also a process of deconstruction and reformation, of grappling more honestly with the past. 'The narrator considers herself a feminist and yet she's been hurt by other women and will hurt other women in her turn,' says the author. That gap between our intent and our actions is exploited throughout Theory and Practice, as the narrator begins to obsess about her lover and then the woman who's also sleeping with him. The righteous feminist soon has to confront her own petty insecurities and jealousy – her decidedly un-feminist id – and the result is subtly hilarious. As much as de Kretser's crackling prose and probing intellectualism have wowed awards judges – her Stella win caps a tally that includes two Miles Franklin awards and three Christina Stead prizes – it's this wit, the levity and playfulness of her sentences, that makes her so fun to read. 'I think we confuse seriousness and solemnity. We think if it's funny, it must be trivial,' says de Kretser. 'For me, being funny is a way of being very serious.' In her novel, she pokes sly fun at those pesky post-structuralists – Derrida, Foucault et al – who took the idea of literary deconstruction to an absurd, and eventually meaningless, place. De Kretser remembers post-structuralism descending like a cloud on Melbourne University in the 80s: 'Suddenly theory became more important than literature.' And how did she find it? 'I just sort of skulked in corners. We were all scared.' She laughs at the memory, but you can almost sense the chill run down her spine. Entertaining and intellectual, Theory and Practice is the kind of novel that – like most of de Kretser's work – will not only bear rereading, but benefit from it. The false novel that opens the book contains dark echoes of what is to come, but only on reflection. The themes of the book are layered on top of each other, but also spread outwards like tendrils. And that formal experimentation, so clever but judicious and perfectly calibrated, points the way for future works by the author. 'I quote Woolf to that effect in the novel. She says, 'I want to go on adventuring and changing'. And that is what any artist worth their salt wants to do,' says de Kretser. 'You want to keep yourself interested and intervene in the novel form. It's good to expand our notions of what a novel can be.'
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stella prize 2025: shortlist entirely women of colour for the first time in award's history
The Stella prize, Australia's award for women and non-binary authors, has made history this year with a shortlist featuring only works by women of colour, for the first time since the award was established in 2013. Announced on Tuesday morning, this year's shortlist includes Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire's essay collection, Black Witness (winner of the 2025 Victorian premier's award for Indigenous writing), about the failures of mainstream media and power of Indigenous journalism; two-time Miles Franklin-winner Michelle de Kretser's Theory & Practice, a reckoning with fiction, memoir and colonialism; and playwright, poet and author Samah Sabawi's family memoir, Cactus Pear For My Beloved, tracing her roots from British-occupied Palestine through to contemporary Queensland. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Also on the shortlist are Santilla Chingaipe's Black Convicts, excavating the history of slavery in Australia; Melanie Cheng's novel The Burrow, about a grieving family who adopt a pet rabbit during Covid lockdown; and Jumaana Abdu's debut novel, Translations, about a woman who moves with her young daughter to rural New South Wales to build a new life. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion The Stella prize celebrates 'original, excellent and engaging' fiction, nonfiction and poetry by Australian women and non-binary writers. The winner takes home $60,000, with each of the shortlisted writers receiving $4,000. This year's prize was judged by critic Astrid Edwards, Gudanji/Wakaja and Kalkadoon author Debra Dank, writer and critic Leah Jing McIntosh, author Yassmin Abdel-Magied, and journalist and author Rick Morton. 'These works showcase an incredible command of craft and understanding of our uncertain time,' Edwards, who chaired the panel, wrote in a statement. 'They stood out to the judging panel for their integrity, compassion and fearlessness.' The Stella prize winner will be awarded at a public ceremony at Carriageworks in Sydney on 23 May, as part of the Sydney writers' festival. Last year the prize was won by Alexis Wright for her novel Praiseworthy.
