The 2026 Stella Prize Longlist presents another twelve exceptional works by Australian women and non-binary writers.
Spanning poetry, memoir, fiction, non-fiction and graphic works, the 2026 longlist presents themes that explore the transformative power of memory, truth and the intrinsic beauty of creative fiction.
This year Stella received 212 entries. Soon, this list will be reduced to six to make up the Shortlist, announced on Wednesday, April 8th.
All the Longlist can be found below. As Stella Prize CEO and Creative Director Fiona Sweet said, “There are stories here for everyone, stories that will resonate, surprise, delight, and challenge.”
In alphabetical order by author’s last name, the 2026 Stella Prize longlist is:
· KONTRA by Eunice Andrada (Poetry)
· The Rot by Evelyn Araluen (Poetry)
· Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Non-Fiction/Memoir)
· Ankami by Debra Dank (Nonfiction/Memoir/Social commentary)
· Fireweather by Miranda Darling (Fiction)
· Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea by Natalie Harkin (Non-Fiction)
· Cannon by Lee Lai (Graphic Novel)
· Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Fiction)
· Wait Here by Lucy Nelson (Fiction)
· Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family by Micaela Sahhar (Nonfiction/Memoir)
· 58 Facets: On violence and the law by Marika Sosnowski (Non-Fiction)
· I Am Nannertgarrook by Tasma Walton (Fiction)
Each of the longlisted authors receives $2,000 in prize money thanks to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Eunice Andrada, Kontra.
Kontra is remarkable because it appears confessional and personal while in fact playing with a poetic speaking persona. That figure is the kontrabida, a provocateur, villainess figure from Filipino television dramas. Through the figure of the bida Andrada grapples with the complexities of Filipina feminine identities. The collection challenges readers’ assumptions about how contemporary poetry works, inviting us to remain at a distance from the writing, while at the same time allowing us to become intimate with many of its voices. The collection as a whole emphasises setting, character, scene and action in ways we associate with prose narrative, and it does so through innovative, surprising poetic technique, form and voice. We find humour and playfulness, quiet but insistent. Andrada’s scenes are sometimes like teledrama sets – groups of women in a room, with life swirling around them, letting her play with the melodramatic figure of the bida without giving into melodrama. Her canny title also resonates in the poet’s sense of being out of step both with her Filipina heritage and her Australian identity. She’s always exploring the idea of selfhood made from contrary motions, migrations and creative forms.
Evelyn Araluen, The Rot.
A visceral collection of poetry and fragmented prose as shattered and sharp as a shard of glass. Evelyn Araluen unleashes this incendiary collection like a volley of burning arrows aimed squarely at the corrosive heart of colonialism, capitalism, misogyny and genocide. The poems examine rot as both literal process and structural condition, the death of country, death on country, the horrors of Gaza, global violence and the ongoing moral decay of settler colonialism. Structured in three sections, Holdings, Fragments on Rotting and Unfoldings, the collection insists on resistance and justice then imagines a post-colonial world for girls who survive this one. The prose is exquisitely distilled and painfully charged; the regular use of second person unapologetically confrontational. The Rot is an uncompromising demand for girls and women to own their desire and reckon with their rage as a force to power their own liberation. “This was always meant to hurt.”
Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days.
On Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine Brooks was home on Martha’s Vineyard. As she was sitting down to work on her novel Horse, she received a phone call that changed her life. Tony Horwitz, her partner of more than 35 years, had died, collapsing on the street in Washington DC. Brooks, in her retelling of this tragic event, alternates between the logistical and emotional turmoil one experiences in the immediate aftermath of a loved one dying. There are complications with health insurance and credit cards, there are children who need to be told of their father’s death, there are memorials to organise. These immediate concerns are contrasted with Brooks, three years later. She has travelled to Flinders Island to sit deeply in her grief and examine it, to look it dead in the eye. She does so in only the way a decidedly skilled writer can and the result is stunning. As much as this is a grief memoir, it is also the portrait of a long and beautiful marriage. It is a writer grappling with pain and loss and showing it to us saying, ‘this is what it feels like for me, how does it feel to you’? A gift from a writer to a reader.
Debra Dank, Ankami.
In this harrowing and haunting memoir Dank continues her deeply personal journey of truth-telling, discovery and cultural reclamation. Driven by a long-held desire to understand her family history more fully, Dank’s visit to the National Archives reveals a devastating truth: her paternal grandmother gave birth to ten children, four of whom were stolen. Ankami also bears witness to the unpaid labour of Aboriginal workers, including Dank’s grandmother, exposing the not-so- distant history of Australia as a nation built on exploitation and slavery. Dank describes her writing as non-linear and organic, her voice resists the flattening language of archival records in a restoration of the dignity and humanity of her ancestors. Ankami is a meditation on what it means to live in the aftermath of colonial rupture, underpinned by an unending love of family and desire for connection. Ankami offers an opportunity for deep listening, a profoundly moving testament to the essential power of memory.
Miranda Darling, Fireweather.
Against a backdrop of raging bushfires and devastating winds, we reunite with Darling’s protagonist, Winona, from her previous book Thunderhead. Winona has somehow broken free from the claustrophobic domestic purgatory we last encountered her. But she is in no way free from societal expectations of her as a woman, as a mother, as a sane person or from the control and power of her cruel now ex-husband. A chorus of voices fill Winona’s mind offering advice, wisdom and confusion. She finds solace in abandoned plants and cuttings as well as animals but the forces that threaten her are strong. Darling’s stylised sharp prose shimmers on the page and pulls the reader in deeply to this narrative of feminist rage. There is music in this book, there is deep time, there is philosophy, there is a river of tears. And there is a woman fighting for her children and for her essential self.
Natalie Harkin, Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea.
Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea is a powerful reckoning with the state archives that illuminates and vividly remembers the harrowing experiences of Aboriginal women and girls in domestic servitude in South Australia. The intergenerational effects on families and communities are deeply conveyed, and Harkin’s woven truth-telling is a potent response to whitewashed narratives and brutal systems of control and capture. No longer invisible or ignored, the labour histories of Aboriginal women are important in the greater context of a nation still denying its past. The inclusion of oral history, poetry, memory stories, photographs and collaborative artwork alongside letters, reports and newspaper articles shapes this work as a communal gathering and a moving tribute to Aboriginal women’s strength and resilience. Balanced skilfully and purposely as both history examination and multi-modal creative testimony, Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea models what a relational transformative text can do.
Lee Lai, Cannon.
Reliable and dutiful Cannon (real name: Lucy; nickname Luce; ironically – or perhaps not – Luce Cannon) has myriad responsibilities. During the day, she helps her avoidant mother by taking care of her elderly gung-gung (maternal grandfather). At night, she works in the pressure-cooker kitchen of a fine dining restaurant. In her off-hours, she’s a confidante and troubleshooter for best friend Trish. However, Cannon is about to crack – something we see in a dizzying flashforward in the first pages. Cannon is a compelling depiction of a fracturing friendship between two queer, second-generation Chinese women. It is also a bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry, the profound toll it takes to be the “responsible one”, and what can happen when you are being taken advantage of repeatedly. (Bonus: it is also, somehow, very funny.) Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, shock and delight, and Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot. And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.
Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore.
A woman washes onto the shore of a remote island off the Antarctic coast. She is rescued by a family – a widowed father and his three children – who are the last inhabitants of an abandoned research base and seed bank. But who is this mysterious woman and what is she doing here? And what is this family hiding from her – and us, the reader? In Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy has produced a ripping, plot-driven literary page-turner. At the same time, she also invites us to ask profound and timely questions about how we raise children, and what we choose to salvage, in a world on the verge of collapse. Wild Dark Shore is as much a climate change-era mystery as an elegy to a world at the edge of ruin, punctuated with some of the most glorious descriptions of the majesty of the natural world. Written with a screenwriter’s eye for drama, and a novelist’s understanding of inner pain, Wild Dark Shore achieves a rare feat: a crowd-pleaser that is as fiercely intelligent as it is compelling. You will race to the end, with utter determination to talk to someone about That Twist once you’re done.
Lucy Nelson, Wait Here.
The glistening stories in this debut collection ask questions of mothering and its absence, of how we shape a family and build a life. What is common to the women in these stories is their childlessness. It is one aspect of their being but not their entire selves. As Nelson writes, ‘It is nothing. It is everything.’ Nelson understands short-form fiction and uses the form in incredibly interesting and innovative ways. These stories are about women and their complicated relationships with the decision to have children. The subject feels ripe for exploration in short-form fiction. The collection, with each story accumulating, enacts an invitation to the reader to lean in closely and see these women’s complex inner lives play out on the page. The stories are incredibly varied in both tone, perspective and style, showcasing the full range of Nelson’s literary skills and craft. These stories are virtuosic.
Micaela Sahhar, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family.
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a tender, absorbing family memoir about Palestinian diaspora, living across three continents, keeping traditions alive even as they lose home and history. At the centre of this book is a journey the author took to Jerusalem to visit the family home her grandfather built, a home that has loomed large in the collective memory. It’s a generative offering, a work that brings together people, stories and ideas. It consists of 48 entries symbolising the 1948 Nakba that displaced the author’s family and eventually led them to Melbourne. Sahhar writes lyrically and surprisingly, capturing many voices and characters across history and place. Real people are summoned warmly in these pages, from the author’s relationship with her father, to a friendship with the late historian Patrick Wolfe. Rarely heavy-hearted, the memoir is filled with wry humour and sharp observation. Through the inclusion of photographs, family narrative and personal political history, Sahhar offers tender portraits of resistance, which flow into a thoughtful exploration of living on Aboriginal land as an Australian Palestinian. The book is a lyrical lament on loss and ritual, and the recovery of meaning. ‘Look here, I have built our beautiful home out of words,’ Sahhar writes. A rousing achievement.
Marika Sosnowski, 58 Facets: on violence and the law.
58 Facets is a book that defies categorisation or comparison. A hybrid of personal memoir, scholarly research and sobering investigation, Sosnowski’s micro-essays on law, violence and revolution span 1930s Europe to the modern-day Levant, from the Syrian resistance against the bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad to Australia’s immigration policies and COVID-19 response. What unites these moments and places? Firstly, they are flashpoints in how the state uses laws and checkpoints against ordinary people, essentially making violence legal. Secondly is Sosnowski herself. She has skin in the game: her ancestors arrived in Australia after surviving Nazi persecution, while one great uncle became a significant player in the founding of the Israeli military. In 58 Facets, Sosnowski frankly lays out the horrors of the Holocaust and family ties to genocidal war crimes perpetrated on Palestinians, offering a confronting reminder to us that none of us can be remote observers in history. Instead, we are all participants, beneficiaries, victims and, quite often, both. With devastating efficiency and clarity, Sosnowski connects dots across time and history, and repeatedly forces the reader to stop in their tracks and reconsider their own story.
Tasma Walton, I am Nannertgarrook.
A page-turner that is also deeply researched, beautifully written, and very accessible; an embodiment of Walton’s First Nations heritage and culture that welcomes all readers into its rich emotional landscape. This is that rare bird, a serious and inviting historical novel. The story is about the impact of the British seal-hunting and whaling industries on First Nations lifeways in Australia. Walton recounts the story of her ancestor’s abduction from Boonwurrung Country, where she was sold into enslaved labour in Tasmania, entering a life of forced migrations that led eventually to southern West Australia. It’s a story of loss and grief, as well as dignity and the endurance of the profound meaning and spiritual aliveness of whale song, motherhood, and marine life across centuries of extraction and dispossession.
The Past Lives of the Stella Prize
From Alexis Wright to Emily Bitto, past Stella winners are now part of the fabric of Australian literature—and several are now on school curriculums, foreign rights lists and film producers’ radars. Here’s a quick look back at the winners who paved the way:
2025: Theory & Practice – Michelle de Kretser
2024: Praiseworthy – Alexis Wright
2023: The Jaguar – Sarah Holland-Batt
2022: Dropbear – Evelyn Araluen
2021: The Bass Rock – Evie Wyld
2020: See What You Made Me Do – Jess Hill
2019: The Erratics – Vicki Laveau-Harvie
2018: Tracker – Alexis Wright
2017: The Museum of Modern Love – Heather Rose
2016: The Natural Way of Things – Charlotte Wood
2015: The Strays – Emily Bitto
2014: The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka – Clare Wright
2013: Mateship with Birds – Carrie Tiffany
Shortlist announced
8 April 2026
Winner announced
13 May 2026
