We’re excited to announce that Jess Hill’s four-year investigation into domestic abuse, See What You Made Me Do, is the 2020 Stella Prize winner. Now in its eighth year, the Stella Prize awards one author with a $50,000 prize. This buys a writer some measure of financial independence and thus time – that most undervalued yet necessary commodity for women – to focus on their writing.
Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the wrong question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it?Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators — and the systems that enable them — in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience — abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence — not in generations to come, but today.Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do radically rethinks how to confront the national crisis of fear and abuse in our homes.