Reading List · Literary Prizes
The prize is named after Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, the writer who signed her books “Miles” and left her money to a literary award. In 2011 that award’s shortlist had no women on it, and the Stella Prize was set up in answer: every year one book by an Australian woman or non-binary writer, novel, memoir, history or poetry, and since 2026 a graphic novel too. Fourteen books have won it, and one writer has won it twice.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 winners since 2013 · Fiction, non-fiction and poetry · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 22 September 2026
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Quick answer
The Stella Prize goes once a year to one book by an Australian woman or non-binary writer, in any form: fiction, non-fiction or poetry. It was first awarded in 2013 and is worth $60,000 to the winner. There have been 14 winners, and only Alexis Wright has won it twice. The 2026 winner, announced on 13 May, is Lee Lai’s Cannon, the first graphic novel to win. What the fourteen are about, and which form each one is, is further down.
How this page chooses
This page has every winner, so there is nothing to choose between: all fourteen have a full entry, oldest first, and the timeline underneath repeats them with the form each one took.
Under each book is a line of plain fact about it — another prize, a first, a detail of how it was made — and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first, one for each year. The line in red is a fact about the book, not an opinion about it.
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A dairy farm near Cohuna in northern Victoria in the 1950s. Harry, a farmer whose wife has left him, keeps notes on the kookaburras that live by the farm; next door is Betty, raising two children on her own. The book moves between them, the animals and the children growing up.
The first book to win the Stella Prize.
The Eureka Stockade, the 1854 uprising of gold miners at Ballarat, told through the women who were there: the wives, shopkeepers, publicans and miners whom the usual version of the story leaves out.
Clare Wright is a historian at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
Lily, a girl from an ordinary family in 1930s Melbourne, becomes friends with Eva, the daughter of the painter Evan Trentham, and is taken into the family’s house, which is full of artists and has almost no rules. She looks back on it as an adult.
Emily Bitto’s first novel.
Two young women wake up drugged in a remote compound in the Australian outback, with their heads shaved, guarded by men. They find out that they and the other prisoners have one thing in common: each was at the centre of a sex scandal involving a powerful man.
Charlotte Wood’s later novel Stone Yard Devotional was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024.
Marina Abramović’s 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Artist Is Present, in which she sat silently opposite members of the public for three months, and the people who come to watch, among them a film composer whose wife is ill.
Heather Rose is from Tasmania.
A portrait of the Aboriginal leader and activist Tracker Tilmouth, built from the voices of the people who knew him, and from his own, rather than from a single narrator.
Alexis Wright is the only writer to have won the Stella Prize twice, with this book and with Praiseworthy in 2024.
When her mother breaks a hip, Laveau-Harvie goes back from Australia to her parents’ ranch in Alberta, Canada, and to a mother she has been estranged from for years, and a father who has been left alone with her.
Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s first book.
An investigation of domestic abuse in Australia: how coercive control works, why victims stay, what the police and courts do, and what has been tried elsewhere to stop it.
Jess Hill is an investigative journalist.
Three women in three centuries, all living in sight of the Bass Rock, the island off North Berwick on the Scottish coast, and all living with the threat of violence from men.
Evie Wyld grew up between Australia and London, where she lives.
Poems and short prose pieces that take apart the cute and comic images of Australia, from gumnut babies to the drop bear of the title, and what they leave out about the country and the people who were there first.
Evelyn Araluen is a Bundjalung writer; she was on the 2026 shortlist again with The Rot.
Poems about her father’s long illness with Parkinson’s disease and his last years in aged care, and about grief after his death.
The second poetry book in a row to win the prize.
A small town in the far north of Australia under a heavy haze that will not lift, and a family in it: a father with a plan to replace trucks with donkeys, his wife and their sons.
Alexis Wright’s second Stella Prize, after Tracker in 2018.
A young woman who came to Australia from Sri Lanka is writing a thesis in Melbourne in the 1980s, reading literary theory and Virginia Woolf and getting into a messy love affair; the author interrupts the story to question it.
Michelle de Kretser has also won the Miles Franklin Award twice.
Cannon is a chef, small and quiet to the people around her and full of feeling underneath, and the book follows her long, difficult friendship with Trish, which goes back to high school.
The first graphic novel to win the Stella Prize, announced on 13 May 2026.
All 14 winners, with the form of each book. Every one has a full entry above.
Miles Franklin published her first novel, My Brilliant Career, under a name that did not give away that she was a woman, and when she died she left money for an annual prize for a novel about Australian life. The Miles Franklin Award has been given since 1957. The Stella Prize, first awarded in 2013, uses her first name and was set up for books by Australian women, in any form, not only the novel.
Alongside the prize, the organisation behind it runs the Stella Count, a yearly tally of how many books by women are reviewed in Australian newspapers and magazines, compared with books by men.
Half of the winners are novels, but the prize has also gone to a history of the Eureka Stockade, a collective memoir, a book about domestic abuse and two collections of poetry. In 2026 it went for the first time to a graphic novel, Lee Lai’s Cannon, a book told in drawings as much as in words.
An Australian literary prize for one book a year by an Australian woman or non-binary writer, in any form: fiction, non-fiction or poetry. It was first awarded in 2013 and is worth $60,000 to the winner.
Lee Lai, for the graphic novel Cannon, announced on 13 May 2026. It was the first graphic novel to win.
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, the author of My Brilliant Career, who published under the name Miles Franklin and whose will set up the Miles Franklin Award.
Yes, one writer: Alexis Wright, in 2018 with Tracker and in 2024 with Praiseworthy.
$60,000 to the winner, and $5,000 to each of the other shortlisted writers.
Yes. It went to poetry two years running, to Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear in 2022 and Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar in 2023.
The Miles Franklin is for a novel of Australian life by any writer and has been given since 1957. The Stella is for a book in any form by an Australian woman or non-binary writer and has been given since 2013.
My guide to authors by country goes wider than the prize, for Australia and for everywhere else.
Winner list last verified 22 September 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Lee Lai’s Cannon is already an internationally acclaimed graphic novel.”
— Sophie Gee, chair of the 2026 Stella Prize judges
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