Sri Lankan-born Michelle de Kretser, who lives in Warrane/Sydney and is an Honorary Associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney, has taken out Stella Prize’s top honours for her book Theory & Practice.
The yearly prize, established in 2013, is awarded for any Australian book that champions and amplifies the voices and stories of women and non-binary individuals.
De Kretser has won several awards for her previous books. Theory & Practice itself was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction as well as the BookPeople BookData Adult Fiction Book Of The Year.
Of the winning novel, the 2025 Stella judges note in their report: ‘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.’
Read: Stella Prize shortlist 2025
In her review of the book for ArtsHub, Nina Culley says” ‘It’s shambolic, pragmatic, a touch angsty and its fragmented structure, along with the absence of a conventional narrative arc, may frustrate some readers. But for those who appreciate the elasticity of form and the generative tension between what we profess to believe and how we actually behave, this is a book you’ll carry – with you and within you – for a long time.’
In its 13th year of operation, Stella received over 180 entries vying for the annual award worth $60,000; the winning announcement was made on the evening of 23 May at Sydney Writers Festival.
Past winners of the Stella Prize:
2024: Alexis Wright for Praiseworthy
2023: Sarah Holland-Batt for The Jaguar
2022: Evelyn Araluen for Dropbear
2021: Evie Wyld for The Bass Rock
2020: Jess Hill for See What You Made Me Do
2019: Vicki Laveau-Harvie for The Erratics
2018: Alexis Wright for Tracker
2017: Heather Rose for The Museum of Modern Love
2016: Charlotte Wood for The Natural Way of Things
2015: Emily Bitto for The Strays
2014: Clare Wright for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka
2013: Carrie Tiffany for Mateship with Birds
