Michelle de Kretser wins the Stella Prize with a genre-bending questioning of art and expectation

Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most innovative and internationally recognised writers, has been awarded this year’s Stella Prize for her seventh novel, Theory & Practice – currently longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

This is De Kretser’s first Stella Prize win. She is one of only a few women to have won the Miles Franklin twice, for The Life to Come (2018) and Questions of Travel (2013), both shortlisted for the Stella.

Theory & Practice explicitly engages with Virginia Woolf’s ambitions for her final book. Woolf had initially wanted The Years to function as an essay spiked with fiction. The Stella Prize judges said: “in her refusal to write a novel that reads like a novel, de Kretser instead gifts her reader a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living”.

Theory & Practice might look like a slender volume at 183 pages, but it is substantial in its themes, engaging with the slippages and gaps between the theoretical and the practical. These include the gulf between feminist ideals and reality, and between mothers and daughters – both literal and metaphorical.

Defying genre and form

The Stella Prize, established in 2012 to address the underrepresentation of women writers, expanded from 2019 to include the work of non-binary writers. It has increasingly rewarded writers from diverse communities – culminating in this year’s shortlist, entirely composed of women of colour – and experimental work.