Winner of the 2020 Stella Prize

See What You Made Me Do – Jess Hill

Nonfiction · Black Inc

See What You Made Me do

About the book

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.

“It is a sensitive read, which—whilst confronting—is compelling and hopeful.”

– 2020 Stella Prize Judges

Jess Hill

About the author


Jess Hill

Jess Hill is an investigative journalist who has been writing about domestic violence since 2014. Prior to this, she was a producer for ABC Radio, a Middle East correspondent for The Global Mail, and an investigative journalist for Background Briefing. She was listed in Foreign Policy’s top 100 Women to follow on Twitter, and her reporting on domestic violence has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards.

Further Reading



Reviews 

“It is Hill’s capacity to keep broad political structures and the minutiae of personal experience and emotion in her sights at all times that makes this such a unique and powerful contribution to a field of literature which, to our shame, is still only just emerging.” Alecia Simmonds, Sydney Review of Books.

Links

Read the 2020 Stella Prize Announcement Broadcast report in The Guardian.

Listen to Jess Hill in conversation with Sally Warhaft in The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing & Idea’s Fifth Estate: Family Violence Emergency.

Listen to Evelyn Araluen read from Dropbear via The Leaf Bookshop

 

Judges’ report


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