From the 2026 Stella Prize Chair of Judges, Sophie Gee

What an honor to be standing in this room of distinguished Australian women, non-binary folks, and a handful of men: a passionate community of writers, readers, creators, supporters and artistic visionaries. Everyone here tonight has made the choice to place writing at the center of their lives. To speak personally, my heart opened, my mind expanded from reading these books, with these judges, on behalf of this community of readers and writers.

Books-people (ie. all of us) know that literature changes lives because it keep us company in our most painful and joyful human experiences. Good writing brings us closer to others and insists on our shared humanity.

For the first time in modern human history, however, (and by this I mean history since 2700 BCE, when the Epic of Gilgamesh was first inscribed on clay tablets in Mesopotamia) the human compulsion to read and write are at risk. Collectively, we have been neglecting the reality that that reading and writing make us who we are. To use words that are out-of-fashion, we are forgetting that reading and writing make us more generous, more compassionate, and more virtuous.

Reading and writing cultivate sustained attention and let us inhabit other minds, hearts and worldviews. But reading rates are plummeting, especially among young people. Automated and synthetic writing is proliferating. These artificial technologies save time and money but they are costing us our deep human need to understand ourselves and others by making and sharing what we write.

Yet even as reading and writing lose their hard-won place of honor in human societies, modern MRI technology, psychology and neuroscience research affirm that our human survival; ie our capacity to live curious, connected, emotionally real lives depends on continuing to read deeply and write about our collective experiences. Yes. Our human survival literally depends on reading and writing.

As Chair of the Stella Prize this year, I had the honor to read more than 200 works of imaginative writing made by Australian women’s and non-binary folks’ hands and hearts, all over the world. Their books were made out of hard manual work, powered by human feelings of curiosity, love, anger, joy, despair, and hope. They were made by real bodies who feel pain and love. They were made by searching, endlessly restless human minds seeking deeper truths than any of us can grasp without reading and writing.

As I read, I felt the presence of the minds and bodies and hearts who made them, and I felt the special power of human imagination, which is both breathtaking and imperfect. The humanity of writing lives in its strangeness, unpredictability; in the variety and unevenness of language used by human voices reflecting imperfectly on their experience.

The Stella judging panel this year was a remarkable fivesome of readers and writers. Please join me on the stage, Ellen van Neerven, Jaclyn Crupi, and Benjamin Law. A huge shout-out to Gillian O’Shaugnessy, who is here with us in spirit this evening. As we read together over many months, we collectively became aware of a kind of magic. In reading and talking together we shared our minds and hearts and breath and bodies. Critical reading in other words isn’t just giving books a thumbs up or a thumbs down. It’s saying “this writing has entered my bloodstream and shown me how to live differently.” It’s saying “this writing has let the souls of other readers become part of my soul, and I am changed, even in small ways.”

Human writing and reading give us ways to abide with the truths of uncertainty and irresolution. Human-made stories change us because they are about the constantly changing nature of our lives, how we never have ground under us, how we struggle and fight and love and learn, and we do it over and over again. Sometimes we do it with humor. Sometimes we do it bitterly and resentfully. And sometimes, words are not enough to convey the truth of our human struggles and joys. We need illustrations to reveal juxtapositions between what we can say with words and what we see in front of us.

When it came time to choose one book, that showed us something new about how to be human, the five of us agreed on a wonderful book that made us laugh, touched us deep in our hearts, and was both weird and instantly recognizable. And for unexpected bonuses, it was set in a restaurant and featured a flock of mad, never explained blackbirds.

So it’s a joy to announce the 2026 winner of the Stella Prize, Lee Lai, for her graphic novel Cannon. Congratulations, Lee.