The winner of the 2021 Stella Prize is Evie Wyld for her novel The Bass Rock. Wyld receives $50,000 in prize money thanks to the generous support of the Wilson Foundation.
2021 Winner
About the author
Evie Wyld grew up in Australia and the UK. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Evie’s second novel, All The Birds, Singing, won the 2014 Miles Franklin Award.
2021 Stella Prize Shortlist
2021 Stella Prize Longlist
The 2021 Stella Prize longlist demonstrates the breadth of expression present in Australian literature, and the importance of raising the profile of women and non-binary voices in celebrating this expansive talent. In reading these titles, we pondered what might be lost or overlooked should a prize such as the Stella not exist to specifically examine the output of Australian women and non-binary writers.
In years as uncertain as 2020 and 2021, it is fitting that the Stella Prize longlist includes titles that span the gamut of human enterprise and experience.
This year’s reading presented a diversity of talent and expression, with books exploring people and animals through the lens of fiction and non-fiction, and with a common objective to reach into the heart of what it means to exist in the world today.
The diversity present in this longlist, in terms of style, technique and subject matter, as well as the writers’ ages, experiences and identities, is what makes it so exciting. In this longlist we celebrate experimentalism, risk and vivacity in writing. Here we have books about emotional dysfunction, colonialism, racial identity, sex, the failures of our political and justice systems, the triumph of nature, and much more.
Whilst there were far more than twelve outstanding books entered for this year’s Stella Prize, we are incredibly excited to have longlisted these texts as examples of the high calibre of emerging and established talent in the Australian literary sector.
