The 2026 Stella Prize

From the New York Times bestselling author of Migrations and Once There Were Wolves, a novel about a family living alone on a remote island, when a mysterious woman washes up on shore. 'At once a gripping mystery, an exquisitely written ode to the natural world, and a taut, psychological thriller, Wild Dark Shore is a triumph. Charlotte McConaghy is...

A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toward peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of HorseMany cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her...

The much-anticipated follow-up to acclaimed graphic novelist Lee Lai's Stella-shortlisted Stone Fruit, a funny, dark, emotionally turbulent slice of friendship strife. We arrive to wreckage—a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be...

A dazzling collection of hilarious and heart-wrenching stories united by a groundbreaking theme: each is a sidelong glance at the lives of women who – either by choice or by circumstance – will never be mothers and who feel every way it is possible to feel about it. A dancer discovers she can never have children – a revelation that...

KONTRA enacts a poetics of clashing decadences, testing the tightrope between 'feminine' goodness and deviance, desire and refusal, reverence and repulsion. It casts a female gaze on the kontrabida—a Filipina soap opera villain stuck in a rise-and-fall cycle. The poet reimagines the kontrabida as a figure driven not by revenge, but by wild desire. Oscillating in and out of character,...

Winner of the 2025 ARA Historical Novel PrizeShortlisted for the 2025 NiB Literary Award Based on the true story of Tasma Walton’s ancestor, a powerful, heart-wrenching novel about maternal love that endures against pitiless odds. Kidnapped by sealers and enslaved far from her homeland, Nannertgarrook has a spirit that refuses to bow … From her idyllic life in sea country...

When you have been forcibly displaced from your home, the revolutionary dream of what should have happened … stays alive as a utopian beacon of happiness that will (possibly) never come to pass. To be content and make a meaningful life from the ruins of that wrenching and uprooting is a small, everyday miracle that others easily overlook. 58 Facets...

'Be careful what you wish for,' wrote Aesop, 'lest it come true.' Debra Dank had long been desperate to visit the National Archives, to paint a fuller picture of her family, to add flesh to the name-bones and the few precious stories she possessed. What she discovered would shatter everything she thought she knew about her family and her past....

'If we were different people, to write down these words might be to leave them behind us. But words are our artifacts, and I am seeding a trail for the journey, home.' What does the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherit? It is not property or tangible heirlooms, nor the streets and neighbourhoods of a father's childhood and the deep...

It all began when they started running away . . . Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, and the city in which she lives is besieged by fires. Black ash falls like snow, songbirds screech like dinosaurs, and the doctors are...

The scorching, much-anticipated new book from the winner of the 2022 Stella Prize for Dropbear. The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes, and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from...