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Stella > The Stella Prize > 2014

The 2014 Stella Prize

The winner of the 2014 Stella Prize is Clare Wright for her nonfiction work The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. Wright receives $50,000 in prize money. This is the first time a nonfiction book has won the Stella Prize.

 

 

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2014 Winner

Clare Wright

The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

Nonfiction · Text Publishing

“The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka sheds a bright new light on a dark old Australian story. In her account of the Eureka Stockade and the years leading up to it, historian Clare Wright revisits that well-trodden territory from an entirely new perspective, unearthing images, portraits and stories of the women of 1850s Ballarat.”

– 2014 Stella Prize Judges

About the author

Clare Wright is an historian who has worked as a political speechwriter, university lecturer, historical consultant, and radio and television broadcaster. Her first book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans, garnered both critical and popular acclaim. Clare is currently an Honorary Research Associate in History at La Trobe University, and lives in Melbourne with her husband and three children.


2014 Stella Prize Shortlist

Hannah Kent
Burial Rites
Anna Krien
Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport
Fiona McFarlane
The Night Guest
Kristina Olsson
Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir
Alexis Wright
The Swan Book
Clare Wright
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

News
April 2014

Announcing the winner of the 2014 Stella Prize: Clare Wright for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2014 Stella Prize is Clare Wright for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

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News
May 2014

The 2014 Stella Prize award night: speeches & pics

Read full transcripts of speeches by Annabel Crabb, Kerryn Goldsworthy and Clare Wright at the 2014 Stella Prize Award Night.

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Interviews
April 2014

The Stella Interview: Clare Wright

In this special Stella interview Clare Wright reflects on becoming a scholar and writer and her favourite literary heroine and villain.

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2014 Stella Prize Longlist

Debra Adelaide
Letter to George Clooney
Gabrielle Carey
Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family
Hannah Kent
Burial Rites
Anna Krien
Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport
Melissa Lucashenko
Mullumbimby
Fiona McFarlane
The Night Guest
Kristina Olsson
Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir
Anne Summers
The Misogyny Factor
Helen Trinca
Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John
Alexis Wright
The Swan Book
Clare Wright
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka
Evie Wyld
All the Birds, Singing


One day at the Cairns Railway Station in the summer of 1950, a little boy is snatched from his terrified mother’s arms and spirited away by his enraged father. On the Ballarat goldfields in 1854, the many women who have been written out of the history of the Eureka Stockade are busy storekeeping, performing, mining, marrying and giving birth. In northern Australia, a hundred years into the future, the landscape and its people are devastated by climate change, and what’s left of Aboriginal Australia is still feeling the effects of the Intervention. In Iceland in 1828, a woman is waiting to be executed for the murder of her lover, while in 2012, a Melbourne footballer is standing trial for rape. In the 1960s two very different Australian writers leave the country, living out reclusive lives and dying lonely deaths in England. And in the present day, in her isolated house on the coast of New South Wales, an elderly woman wakes in the dead of night to hear a tiger prowling around the living room. 

That’s just a sample of the wide range of stories, both fact and fiction, included in the 2014 Stella Prize longlist. There are five novels and a collection of short stories, plus biography, history, memoir, and several books that defy easy classification. Most of the fiction, in its different ways, ventures beyond the restrictions of what Patrick White called ‘dun-coloured realism’ into the realms of the quirky, the surreal, the dystopian or the Gothic. Most of the nonfiction titles focus on a particular person but range far beyond that in their implications and themes: in telling one story, they speak for many. The judges were impressed and excited by the depth of talent in this year’s entries, and every title on the longlist easily meets the formal criteria for the Stella Prize: excellent, engaging and original.


2014 Judges

Tony Birch
Annabel Crabb
Kerryn Goldsworthy (chair)
Fiona Stager
Brenda Walker

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