Longlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize
Miranda Darling – Fireweather
Fiction · Scribe Publications
About the Book
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 calling her mad …
In this looking-glass world, Winona is forced to prove she is a sane, rational human being. As the pronouncements of the professionals grow more insistent, so too do the voices crowding inside Winona’s head. She seeks solace in the company of plants and animals, and begins to imagine an entirely other way of being — one that might make whole her broken heart.
“Darling’s stylised sharp prose shimmers on the page and pulls the reader in deeply to this narrative of feminist rage. There is music in this book, there is deep time, there is philosophy, there is a river of tears.”
– 2026 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Miranda Darling
Miranda Darling is a writer, poet, and co-Founder of Vanishing Pictures. She has published two thrillers, two novels, and a non-fiction work on the Empress of Iran. Fireweather is her sixth book. Miranda loves to draw: her cartoons have featured in The Australian and tend to take on a life of their own. She regularly performs spoken word poetry and loves taking photographs, rambling walks, and practicing kendo. Mamma, short-order cook, divemaster, nomad at heart – like every women, she wears many hats, conjuring Visions and noticing the smaller miracles.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Darling writes feminist fiction infused with wit, intertextuality and a poetic command of language, creating a compelling, intricate internal voice that stands, too, as a critique of institutional misogyny in psychiatry.” – Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald
Links
Judges’ Report
Against a backdrop of raging bushfires and devastating winds, we reunite with Darling’s protagonist, Winona, from her previous book Thunderhead. Winona has somehow broken free from the claustrophobic domestic purgatory we last encountered her. But she is in no way free from societal expectations of her as a woman, as a mother, as a sane person or from the control and power of her cruel now ex-husband. A chorus of voices fill Winona’s mind offering advice, wisdom and confusion. She finds solace in abandoned plants and cuttings as well as animals but the forces that threaten her are strong. Darling’s stylised sharp prose shimmers on the page and pulls the reader in deeply to this narrative of feminist rage. There is music in this book, there is deep time, there is philosophy, there is a river of tears. And there is a woman fighting for her children and for her essential self.
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