Debut writer Evelyn Araluen has won the Stella prize, Australia’s literary award for women and non-binary writers, for her collection Dropbear – making her the first poet to win the $60,000 award in the first year poetry was allowed to enter.
The biggest impact this will have on her life, she says, is that she can now drop one of the part-time jobs she works in order to support her writing – which means that she will only have two. She is only half-joking; the lockdowns, cutbacks and cancellations of the past two years have made the already-difficult task of making a living as a writer (of any kind, let alone a poet) even more challenging than usual.
