Some more award winners

Emily Bitto has won the Stella Prize for her debut novel The Strays. 

 The Stella Prize is a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing.

The prize is named after one of Australia’s iconic female authors, Stella Maria Sarah ‘Miles’ Franklin, and was awarded for the first time in 2013. Both nonfiction and fiction books by Australian women are eligible for entry.

The Stella Prize seeks to:

• recognise and celebrate Australian women writers’ contribution to literature
• bring more readers to books by women and thus increase their sales
• provide role models for schoolgirls and emerging female writers
• reward one writer with a $50,000 prize – money that buys a writer some measure of financial independence and thus time, that most undervalued yet necessary commodity for women, to focus on their writing

Some of you may have been fortunate enough to hear Emily speak at Ashburton Library last year as part of our Emerging Authors series.

Also this week ....

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to Anthony Doerr for his novel All the light we cannot see.

The Pulitzer Prize for general non fiction was awarded to Elizabeth Kolbert for her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History