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Debut author wins $50,000 prize

Emily Bitto. Picture: Supplied

elbourne author Emily Bitto has won the $50,000 Stella Prize for The Strays (Affirm Press, $25), her debut novel about the progress of childhood friends Lily and Eva through the conflicted milieu of conservative and bohemian Australia in the second quarter of the 20th century. “I was so surprised,” Bitto said on hearing of her win. “I didn’t even think I had a chance getting on to the shortlist, to be honest. I’m shocked and over the moon.”

In its third year, the Stella Prize is open to works of both fiction and non-fiction by Australian women.

The other authors short-listed this year were West Australian author Joan London for The Golden Age, Maxine Bebena Clarke for Foreign Soil, Christine Kenneally for The Invisible History of the Human Race, Sofie Laguna for The Eye of the Sheep and Ellen van Neerven for Heat and Light.

They each receive $2000.

“The Stella Prize is an award I feel very passionate about, and I am particularly honoured to have won a prize that has grown from a motive so dear to my own heart: the desire to redress gender inequality in the literary world,” Bitto said.

“And to be recognised alongside such an astonishingly talented long- and short list, including writers I revere as a reader.”

In other news, Melbourne writer Murray Middleton has won the prestigious $20,000 Vogel’s Literary Award for his unpublished short story collection, When There’s Nowhere Else to Run. His collection will be published by Allen & Unwin.