Beginning in 2013, a major new literary gong – The Stella Prize – will be Australia’s annual acknowledgement of great works by women authors. It carries a $50,000 purse. That’s major, as it should be. The prize was proposed, attracted prominent supporters, then quickly catalysed into reality as a direct response to the dominance of male authors in the Miles Franklin Literary Award’s shortlists. The organisers’ own words describe the prize as one that ‘will celebrate and recognise Australian women’s writing, encourage a future generation of women writers, and significantly increase the readership for books by women.’
In 2012, a slight majority of all submissions to Cordite Poetry Review have been from women. From the creation side of the literature proposition, there is no shortage of women engaging, writing, developing and submitting. That a prize such as the Stella is now around to acknowledge this fact is a terrific and necessary development. I support this prize.
Where the Miles Franklin strictly considers novels only, similar to the UK’s Orange Prize (an influence on how the Stella might be run), the Stella expands its focus to consider a much wider frame of women’s writing in Australia, a commendable action that makes the Stella unique worldwide in a prize of this stature. Anna Krien’s nonfiction is exemplary, as are Mirranda Burton’s graphic books. Both should be in contention for this prize, and almost certainly will be during those authors’ careers.
But here’s the concern I have: collections of poetry are distinctly excluded from the types of text permissible to submit for consideration. So, too, are plays. This means that two of the great genres of literature since the dawn of its practice are simply erased from the Stella’s blueprints. On a recent reading trip to Melbourne, John Kinsella, globally renowned Australian poet that he is, dubbed Melbourne an ‘epicentre of world poetry’. I might couch that assertion in a more national scope, but the essence is true. Poetry is certainly not withering in Australia. It would be a shame not to consider that work.
Here are two of the consideration guidelines for the Stella prize:
Eligibility rule 3: Both fiction and non-fiction books are eligible for the prize. This includes novels of all genres, collections of short stories by a single author, memoirs, biographies, histories, novellas and verse novels. Illustrated books, including graphic novels, are eligible, provided they are accompanied by a substantial quantity of text.
Eligibility rule 4: Books that are not eligible for the prize include textbooks, guidebooks, self-help, poetry collections, play or film scripts, books written primarily for children, books consisting of illustrations or photographs, and adaptations, unless they represent a significant and creative transformation of the original text.
So why the omission of poetry collections but not verse novels? Who, and equipped with what criteria, will determine the demarcation of a verse novel like Judith Rodriguez’s The Hanging of Minnie Thwaits and a collection of long verse poems on a given theme such as Barbara Temperton’s Southern Edge? How much is a substantial quantity of text in a graphic novel? What would Sappho say to all of this? Or Lally Katz? Or quite a number of the well-established poets who appear in our pages?
It is not my intent with this post to toss another quibbling twig onto the ‘in defense of (or not) poetry’ bonfire. But I do find it a baffling decision to exclude poetry collections and plays from a prize that has admirably taken a bold step to expand its consideration of texts that significantly shape Australian literature (if such a nationalistic flavour even exists, but that’s a post for another time).
Correction: The Orange Prize for Fiction has recently been renamed The Women’s Prize for Fiction
Excluding poetry and drama from the Stella Prize makes no sense, but until the ruling is changed, it is possible to submit both if they are adaptations which “represent a significant and creative transformation of the original text”. Nothing wrong with such a construction, but why take this circuitous route to exercise what should be a right?
Well, the Stella organisers (and the year 1 major donors) have a right to run the prize any which way they like … which is true even if the funding was all from a state or federal source. All prizes need strict parameters, and there are many in Australia that have a rather refined focus. A good thing. There is no moral obligation to be poetry-inclusive in running a major literature prize.
Regarding the Stella, my point is simply that it seems like an under/oversight to not consider new works from poets like Kate Lilley, Kate Fagan, Bonny Cassidy, Keri Glastonbury or Jess Wilkinson (examples of many) when other works of poetry from Kristin Henry or Judith Rodriguez may very well be considered. All of these texts were published in the time frame required for consideration.
Of course you’re right – it’s Stella Prize business how they run their competition – still, it is a literature prize, and a position somewhere between your sane reasoning and my tub thumping would be more representative of what constitutes (everything up to digital and multimodal) and has constituted literature (epic-poetic-dramatic).
Jane Gleeson-White has a recent post (http://overland.org.au/blogs/red-herring/2012/12/2012-the-year-of-australian-women-writers/) on Overland about the Australian Women Writers Challenge (http://auswomenwriters.weebly.com/poetry.html). Of the 1250 reviews that the AWWC has generated, 5 are of poetry books. Sometimes I feel that poetry has done a superb job in earning its walking papers from the grand table of Australian letters, other times I feel quite the opposite.
This post has been very widely-read according to Google stats. I didn’t anticipate much public comment left here and that’s been exactly the case. My hunch that some women authors who do (very much) have an opinion about this post would be compelled to remain silent because they felt ‘they had to’ has been corroborated by a few D & Ms I’ve been half of in the past month … conversations with women who clearly support poetry’s exclusion from the Stella Prize and those acknowledging a slight bewilderment of its exclusion. The common thread: ‘cannot publicly state opinion’ for fear of ___________ .
At the NonfictioNow Conference recently held at RMIT, Emmett Stinson, a lecturer on publishing in the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication, proffers this about the current state of affairs in new Australian writing: “Much of the process of canonization of writers now falls onto the prize system, and literary culture, for better or worse, has become almost entirely a prize culture—a state that is evident in the way all authors’ bios list not only their wins but also the instances in which they have been shortlisted for an ever proliferating number of literary prizes.” His whole address is worth a read: http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/against-creativity.html
I tend to agree.
So do I, and repeat …
How vainly writers themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak or bays