Other past winners include poets Sarah Holland-Batt<\/a> (The Jaguar, 2023) and Evelyn Araluen<\/a> (Dropbear, 2023), and Booker-shortlisted novelist Charlotte Wood<\/a> (The Natural Way of Things, 2016).<\/p>\n Taking you through the 2025 Stella shortlist are ABC critics Kate Evans, Claire Nichols, Daniel Browning, Nicola Heath, Anna Kelsey-Sugg and Declan Fry. The winner of the Stella Prize will be announced on May 23, 2025.<\/p>\n Translations by Jumaana Abdu<\/p>\n Vintage<\/strong><\/p>\n Abdu wrote the manuscript while studying medicine at university. (Suppled: Penguin Books Australia)<\/p>\n Jumaana Abdu’s stunning debut novel starts with an exodus. Thirty-five-year-old Aliyah and her young daughter, Sakina, have left the city behind to start a life on the land in rural New South Wales. Prickly Aliyah wants to shrink her world down to nothing but herself and her daughter, “the only two people they needed in order to survive”.<\/p>\n Aliyah wants to become an ‘uncitizen’. It’s a form of self-preservation. She’s encountered a series of personal disasters, including ending a difficult marriage and the recent death of her father, and she imagines a quiet life in her new home, growing her own food and raising her child in safety.<\/p>\n Listen to ABC RN’s The Book Show<\/a><\/p>\n Your favourite fiction authors share the story behind their latest books.<\/p>\n But various people will attempt to break down the walls Aliyah has so carefully put up. There’s Billie, a big-hearted midwife who becomes her friend; Shep, a quiet Palestinian farmhand (who also happens to be the local imam); and Hana, Aliyah’s troubled childhood friend, who reappears in Aliyah’s life in dire circumstances.<\/p>\n Adding to the drama, Aliyah’s house might be haunted and there’s a bushfire on the way.<\/p>\n There’s so much at play in this novel \u2014 explorations of faith, grief, community, parenthood, friendship, domestic abuse, love and climate change. But Abdu negotiates this with incredible skill, never losing sight of the narrative and staying true to the characters at the story’s centre. Translations is a moving and timely novel that richly deserves its place on the Stella shortlist.<\/p>\n \u2014 Claire Nichols<\/p>\n Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser<\/p>\n Text Publishing<\/strong><\/p>\n De Kretser was shortlisted for the Stella in 2013 for Questions of Travel and again in 2018 for The Life to Come. (Supplied: Text)<\/p>\n Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel (her seventh) engages us with a trick: it begins with a story set in Europe in 1957. An Australian character, with an entire backstory of love and loss and culture and colonialism, watches children on a mountainside, and there’s the sense that drama and disaster are close by.<\/p>\n Just as quickly, we’re thrown out of the story into another. “At that point, the novel I was writing stalled,” the narrator informs us. And at that point, dear reader, the reading experience itself is stalled \u2014 up-ending for good the tension between the theory of narrative and the practice of immersion.<\/p>\n Listen to ABC RN’s The Bookshelf<\/a><\/p>\n The latest and best fiction reviewed by a team of dedicated bibliophiles.<\/p>\n Instead, for most of the rest of the book, we’re in 1986 with a young woman undertaking post-grad work in Melbourne, navigating her intellectual and creative life, friendships, love and jealousies in a rented flat and op shop clothes. Another trick, too, is that this supposedly “unnamed protagonist” does indeed have a name, we just don’t hear it for most of the book. Another sly joke there.<\/p>\n We watch as she encounters passionate theory wars and academic supervisors who are so very “black leather jacket”, launches into a messy love affair and writhes through expensive long-distance phone calls with her mother in conversations layered with meaning and love and complicated emotion. Then there’s that other mother \u2014 the Woolfmother \u2014 Virginia Woolf as both influence and inspiration, and spine-stiffening racist, with her offhand comments about a Sri Lankan (then Ceylonese) “mahogany-coloured wretch”.<\/p>\n This is a novel that is intelligent, funny and complicated \u2014 and worth reading more than once.<\/p>\n \u2014 Kate Evans<\/p>\n Cactus Pear for My Beloved: A Family Story from Gaza by Samah Sabawi<\/p>\n Penguin<\/strong><\/p>\n Melbourne-based Sabawi is also a poet and an award-winning playwright. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)<\/p>\n Samah Sabawi’s book is buoyant, rambunctious and spirited. Combining biography, fiction and history, its primary focus is the story of Karim, Sabawi’s father: the “poor boy from Tuffah” who we follow from childhood onward. Through Karim, Sabawi writes both a love story and a family saga that is inextricable from the travails of Palestine and its people.<\/p>\n Karim’s life contains enough material for several books. Karim’s father, too, the sheikh, frequently regales Karim with stories and object lessons (as well as helping to instil in him a love of literature). Karim’s achievements as a poet and primary school teacher \u2014 eventually buying a house despite barely having money for shaving cream \u2014 are recounted alongside his work as an editor for a Gaza newspaper and a stint in the al-Shukeiri army.<\/p>\n Talk books with us on Facebook<\/a><\/p>\n The ABC’s place for readers to talk books \u2014 with each other, with books specialists from across the ABC, and with your favourite authors.<\/p>\n Sabawi uses a kind of omniscient authorial voice that can be read as an amalgam of both herself and her father. One of the most interesting parts of this voice is that it gives the narrative a sense of oral history being transmitted from one person and generation to the next.<\/p>\n There is thus a sense of continuity: a story is being told to Sabawi’s father, told to Sabawi, told to us. What is at stake \u2014 the location of a place, a culture, a family \u2014 grows with each generation.<\/p>\n Cactus Pear for My Beloved is not fatalistic but if Karim’s love for his wife provides the novel with a sense of joy and possibility, its political events are presided over by majnoon: a madness of devastation.<\/p>\n \u2014 Declan Fry<\/p>\n Black Witness: The Power of Indigenous Media by Amy McQuire<\/p>\n UQP<\/strong><\/p>\n McQuire is an award-winning journalist and podcast host whose work has been published in Guardian Australia, The Saturday Paper and The New York Times. (Supplied: UQP)<\/p>\n Black Witness is journalist Amy McQuire’s first non-fiction book, after her beautiful 2021 picture book, Day Break, in which an Indigenous girl learns why her family isn’t spending January 26 eating fish and chips at the beach like some of her school mates.<\/p>\n McQuire, who has been working in Black media and writing about Indigenous affairs since she was 17, threads new and previously published essays together into this collection, which looks at the 2004 Palm Island uprising<\/a>, the “unabashedly racist” 2007 Northern Territory Intervention<\/a> and continuing Aboriginal deaths in custody.<\/p>\n She describes, for example, the murder of African-American man George Floyd<\/a> by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, and the outrage that followed around the world, including in Australia.<\/p>\n Yet, in response to the 432 deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in custody in Australia between 1991 and 2020, “there is a national silence”, she writes.<\/p>\n “While Australians now engage in collective acts of witnessing for black deaths overseas, they remain apathetic to the black deaths in their own country.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Here, violence inflicted upon black bodies has become “normalised” and “legitimised”.<\/p>\n McQuire argues that the voices of “White Witnesses” have been amplified by mainstream media, the ABC included, where too often Indigenous people are depicted with the same destructive, disempowering stereotypes that have existed for generations.<\/p>\n Black Witnesses, and the Indigenous media that elevates them, have the power to instil strength and to push Black voices to the forefront, she writes; therefore, “we must bear witness \u2026 we must understand”.<\/p>\n McQuire’s journalistic attention to detail and data is unflinching, but centred at all times in this collection are the Black stories and voices behind statistics: she sits with mothers, uncles, daughters; families who are mourning, resisting, witnessing.<\/p>\n Black Witness makes a powerful case that it is incumbent on those in the mainstream to listen to them.<\/p>\n \u2014 Anna Kelsey-Sugg<\/p>\n The Burrow by Melanie Cheng<\/p>\n Text Publishing<\/strong><\/p>\n The Burrow was also shortlisted for the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. (Supplied: Text)<\/p>\n The Burrow \u2014 the second novel from GP-turned-author Melanie Cheng \u2014 is set in Melbourne, where the COVID curfew has lifted but restrictions are still in force. As the book opens, Jin, an emergency doctor, is travelling home from picking up a pet rabbit for his 10-year-old daughter Lucie. By page three, we learn he has another daughter, Ruby, who died in an accident.<\/p>\n Cheng slowly reveals the details of that tragic episode throughout the novel. Although slim, The Burrow renders the entire universe of one grief-stricken family, still reeling four years after the death of the six-month-old Ruby. Jin suffers from chest pain like “a toothache \u2026 the incessant gnaw of a cavity or an ulcer or a necrotic wound” and his wife, Amy, has writer’s block despite the looming deadline for her second book.<\/p>\n When Amy’s mother, Pauline, has a fall at home, breaking her wrist, she comes to stay with her daughter. Pauline hasn’t been inside the house since the day of the accident, and we gain a clearer picture of her role in the tragedy as the book progresses.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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