De Kretser wins 2025 Stella Prize for ‘Theory & Practice’
Michelle de Kretser has won the 2025 Stella Prize, worth $60,000, for her seventh novel, Theory & Practice (Text).
In their joint report, the judges said: ‘Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice opens on the image of an Australian geologist hiking in the Swiss Alps, yet soon takes a swerve, interrupted by the writer herself, or a version of the writer herself, as she realises that she no longer wants to “write novels that read like novels”. “Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth”.
‘Theory & Practice is such an attempt, and true to form (or perhaps formlessness), de Kretser’s “mess” is no ordinary mess but rather instead a brilliantly auto fictive knot, composed of the shifting intensities and treacheries of young love, of complex inheritances both literary and maternal, of overwhelming jealousies and dark shivers of shame. Set in 1986, in St Kilda, the narrator is a young graduate student researching Virginia Woolf, and sorting through the “messy gap” between theory and practice, as the ever-compelling capital-T Theory sinks its teeth into the Melbourne set. In her refusal to write a novel that reads like a novel, de Kretser instead gifts her reader a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living.’
De Kretser is a Sri Lankan–born writer and honorary associate of the English department at the University of Sydney, and lives in Warrane/Sydney. Her fiction has won several awards. De Kretser’s fourth novel, Questions of Travel (A&U), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, and Book of the Year at NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her fifth novel, The Life to Come (A&U), was shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize, and won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards’ Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Theory & Practice was also shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction and is shortlisted for the BookPeople Book of the Year award in the adult fiction category.
Theory & Practice was selected from a shortlist of six titles by judges Astrid Edwards (chair), Debra Dank, Leah Jing McIntosh, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Rick Morton.
Stella CEO Fiona Sweet said: ‘I have long been a fan of Michelle’s work and am constantly surprised and delighted while reading her books. Theory & Practice is another example of the depth of her talent as a writer.’
Founded in 2012, the Stella Prize aims to uplift books written by Australian women ‘in all their diversity’ as well as ‘support greater participation in the world of literature, and create a more equitable and vibrant national culture’.
The winner of last year’s Stella Prize was Alexis Wright for Praiseworthy (Giramondo).
More details are available on the Stella Prize website.
Photo credit: Joy Lai.
Category: Awards Local news
