Michelle de Kretser has won the 2025 Stella Prize, receiving a $60,000 payment for her acclaimed seventh novel Theory & Practice, published by Text Publishing.
Fiona Sweet, the CEO of the awards, said the book showed de Krester’s talent as a writer.
“In this, the thirteenth year, I am honoured to be working with the judges, the team and board to celebrate the 2025 Stella Prize winner. 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,” Sweet said.
Sri Lankan-born, Michelle de Kretser lives in Sydney and is an honorary associate of the English department at the University of Sydney. She has won several awards for her fiction. Theory & Practice is shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction and the BookPeople BookData Adult Fiction Book Of The Year.
The Stella Prize was established to promote works by Australian female and non-binary writers, who a few years ago were struggling to get a look in at some of the major writing awards.
The Miles Franklin Award is Australia’s leading literary prize and takes its name from the acclaimed author best known for My Brilliant Career. This women and non-binary award also derives its name from Franklin, but it’s her actual first name rather than her penname, she was after all Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin.
The judging panel had high praise for de Kretser’s most recent work.
“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.” said the 2025 Stella Prize Judges in their report.
The author was born in Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, in the late 1950’s and moved to Australia when she was a teenager. She worked as an editor for Lonely Planet travel guides, but while on a sabbatical in 1999 wrote he first novel.
The Rose Grower was de Ketser’s debut, but it was with her second novel The Hamilton Case that she began picking up international awards. Her third novel The Lost Dog made the long list for the prestigious Booker Prize in 2008.
Questions of Travel came in 2012, followed by Springtime in 2014. The Life to Come arrive din 2017 and Scary Monsters in 2021.
