Stella began in 2012 with the Stella Prize, a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing. The aim was to counter the gender bias rife in the Australian literary landscape at the time and promote cultural change through the recognition of women’s perspectives. The winner of the 2021 Stella Prize will be awarded $50,000 prize.
We were very excited to hear that Evie Wyld’s gothic tale of toxic masculinity, The Bass Rock, has won the 2021 Stella Prize winner.
The Bass Rock is a novel that weaves together the lives of three women across four centuries. It explores the legacy of male violence and the ways in which these traumas ripple and reverberate across time and place for three central female characters. Each woman’s choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men in their lives. But in sisterhood there is the hope of survival and new life.