Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most innovative and internationally recognised writers, has been awarded this year’s Stella Prize for her seventh novel, Theory & Practice – currently longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
This is De Kretser’s first Stella Prize win. She is one of only a few women to have won the Miles Franklin twice, for The Life to Come (2018) and Questions of Travel (2013), both shortlisted for the Stella.
Theory & Practice explicitly engages with Virginia Woolf’s ambitions for her final book. Woolf had initially wanted The Years to function as an essay spiked with fiction. The Stella Prize judges said: “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”.
