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Stella > The Stella Prize > 2015

The 2015 Stella Prize

The winner of the 2015 Stella Prize is Emily Bitto for her debut novel The Strays. Bitto receives $50,000 in prize money. This is the first time a debut work has won the Stella Prize.

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2015 Winner

Emily Bitto

The Strays

Fiction · Affirm Press

“Emily Bitto’s debut novel The Strays is about families, art, isolation, class, childhood, friendship, and the power of the past. It’s both moving and sophisticated; both well-researched and original; both intellectually engaging and emotionally gripping.”

– 2015 Stella Prize Judges

About the author

Emily Bitto has a Masters in literary studies and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne. The manuscript of her debut novel The Strays was shortlisted for the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. She lives in Melbourne where she runs a new Carlton winebar, Heartattack & Vine.


2015 Stella Prize Shortlist

Emily Bitto
The Strays
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Foreign Soil
Christine Kenneally
The Invisible History of the Human Race
Sofie Laguna
The Eye of the Sheep
Joan London
The Golden Age
Ellen van Neerven
Heat and Light

News
April 2015

Emily Bitto’s Stella Prize acceptance speech

Read the full transcript of Emily Bitto’s acceptance speech upon winning the 2015 Stella Prize.

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News
April 2015

The 2015 Stella Prize Award Night: Speeches and pictures

Read speeches from the 2015 Stella Prize Award night, including Chloe Hooper’s keynote and Chair of Judges Kerryn Goldsworthy’s winner announcement.

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Interviews
March 2015

The Stella Interview: Emily Bitto

In this special Stella interview Emily Bitto reflects on the writers who’ve shaped her work and the one book she’d take to a desert island.

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2015 Stella Prize Longlist

Emily Bitto
The Strays
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Foreign Soil
Ceridwen Dovey
Only the Animals
Helen Garner
This House of Grief
Sonya Hartnett
Golden Boys
Christine Kenneally
The Invisible History of the Human Race
Sofie Laguna
The Eye of the Sheep
Joan London
The Golden Age
Alice Pung
Laurinda
Inga Simpson
Nest
Ellen van Neerven
Heat and Light
Biff Ward
In My Mother’s Hands


For the third year in a row, the longlist for the Stella Prize reveals the wealth of talent and skill across a broad spectrum of authors, genres and styles in Australian women’s writing. Of the twelve writers whose work appears on the longlist for 2015, almost half a century separates the youngest from the oldest. Some of these writers have just published their first books, while others are experienced veterans of the Australian literary scene. The list includes science writing, short stories, reportage, novels, memoir, and fiction for young adults. Some of the books focus on animals and the natural world, some on children, and some on the things that order our human lives, from the dramatic moral theatre of the law courts to the tiny complexities of DNA.

The exercise of power is a recurrent theme: the power of one race or class over another, of humans over animals, and, most of all, the power of adults over children. The vulnerability of children and the harm that can befall them is a particularly strong theme running through the list, and there’s a kind of symmetry in the fact that, this year, the longlist for a women’s prize should feature several books about boys and boyhood. This year’s list is best summed up in the words of one of the few female winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Chile’s Gabriela Mistral, who won the prize in 1945: ‘We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life.


2015 Judges

Caroline Baum
Tony Birch
Kerryn Goldsworthy (chair)
Sarah Blasko
Melissa Lucashenko

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