When Michelle de Kretser decided to use her acceptance of the Stella prize in May to speak out about Israel’s invasion of Gaza and the Australian government’s role in the ongoing humanitarian crisis, she admitted the speech might be a “career ender”.
It wasn’t: on Monday, De Kretser collected the $80,000 Prime Minister’s Literary award for fiction for the same book, her eighth novel, Theory & Practice.
As the title suggests, the work tackles the relationship between intent and actions, while masterfully testing readers’ assumptions about autobiography and fiction. Judges praised the novel as “elegant, playful and razor sharp”.
In her acceptance speech on Monday evening in Canberra, De Kretser again made a powerful comment to the government.
“In his superb book Rock Flight, Hasib Hourani writes, ‘a rock is not a rock until it’s thrown, but we mustn’t throw rocks, in case they hit the guilty and upset the special envoy for the guilty’,” she told the crowd.
“So I have this piece of paper instead. And tomorrow at my desk, I’ll scrunch it up as Hasib advises. May the genocide guide my aim when I throw. Free Palestine.”
Theory & Practice, set in 1980s Melbourne, follows a female student undertaking a thesis on Virginia Woolf, navigating Bohemian life, radical politics and academic obsession. It’s a work that interrogates the dissonance between ideals and actions, a theme De Kretser believes resonates sharply in today’s political climate.
“There’s always been a gap between what we say and what we do,” the author told the Guardian a few days before Monday’s award was announced.
“But the current crisis in Gaza has made that gap horrific. The genocide has exposed the emptiness of western assurances about international law and humanitarian values. No one believes in those any more.”
De Kretser’s Stella prize speech earlier this year was a bold condemnation of institutional silence. “I haven’t faced direct backlash,” she said, of the aftermath. “But I’m sure I’m persona non grata in certain WhatsApp groups. My name is mud there. The good fortune is, I don’t have an employer – no one can fire me.”
Despite the risks, De Kretser urged emerging writers to speak truthfully. “Art is about truth. Your work will be more powerful if you speak truthfully. But I understand fear. People have families to protect, and jobs.
“Still, I need to ask myself, in 10 years from now, will I be at peace with what I did or didn’t say? I know I won’t still be thinking about a literary award.”
In the nonfiction category, the Saturday Paper journalist Rick Morton won for Mean Streak, his blistering account of the robodebt scandal.
The judges praised the book for its fusion of rigorous reporting and deep empathy.
“With single-minded determination, Morton successfully distils a government’s disgrace into an enthralling account of what happens when we lose our collective conscience,” they said.
Morton first covered the royal commission into robodebt as a journalist, but didn’t plan to revisit the story. “I was exhausted and honestly didn’t want to go near it ever again in my entire life,” he told the Guardian.
That changed when the final report landed in July 2023.
“I had all these emails from senior public servants named in the report, complaining that I was being mean. And I thought, you know what? I don’t think anyone’s learned anything from this.”
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That moment sparked Mean Streak, a forensic unpacking of bureaucratic cruelty and a deeply personal reckoning.
“It radicalised me in a way that I hadn’t been prepared for,” Morton said. “It made me angry. It made me dismissive and cynical beyond extreme, which is not who I am as a person.
“Covering the royal commission, writing the book, it took three years out of my life that I will never get back. I’m just stoked I won … and I’m glad the book exists, but I wish someone else had done it.”
In a recorded message, Morton said: “My niche as a writer seems to be people in power making terrible decisions – and there is enough material there to take to the grave.
“Still today we see reprisals for people calling out the systemic slaughter of human beings as genocide, and our own government seeks to ignore the findings of the Robodebt Royal Commission to make access to information harder, not easier.
“And tens of thousands of welfare recipients are beholden to a private system of Centrelink cops who can ruin their lives … We need to make our moral values legal.”
This year’s winners reflect a literary landscape challenging questions of justice, truth and institutional accountability.
Macquarie University academic Geraldine Fela won the history prize for Critical Care, a documentation of nurses working on the frontline of Australia’s Aids crisis. The judges commended the book for its meticulous research and compassionate storytelling, highlighting the often-overlooked role of healthcare workers in shaping public health policy and community resilience.
In her video acceptance speech, Fela said of her sources: “Their recollection of the profound crisis and suffering decades ago calls on us to think about the healthcare workers in the world right now who are working on a very different kind of frontline. In Gaza, hospitals have become the frontline of a genocide, and healthcare workers are caring for their patients as bombs and bullets rain down on them. It is far, far past time for Australia to sanction Israel and to end the deadly trade in military parts.”
After Fela’s recorded acceptance, a representative took the stage to complete the speech which had been trimmed for length: “[I] speak on behalf of all the shortlisted authors for the Australian history category.
“Each of us is deeply concerned about the future of historical scholarship in Australia.
“We call on the Albanese Labor government to abolish the jobs ready graduate package, a university funding structure that is devastating the humanities and social sciences …
“Within the 2025 shortlist, of the four of us from the university sector, three are from institutions that are in the process of demolishing teaching and research in the humanities and social science,” she said.
“The Australian history category of the Prime Minister’s literary awards is an important public acknowledgement of the contribution made by historical scholarship to our cultural and intellectual life, we urge the Albanese Labor government to do more than acknowledge the handful of us sitting in this room.”
David Brooks, a novelist, poet and essayist from the Blue Mountains, won the poetry category for The Other Side of Daylight, a collection praised for its lyrical depth and philosophical clarity.
In the children’s literature category, Queensland writer and illustrator Peter Carnavas took home the prize for Leo and Ralph, a tender story about friendship and imagination.
The young adult literature award went to Krystal Sutherland for The Invocations, a supernatural thriller that blends gothic horror with contemporary themes of power, trauma, and resistance.
The Prime Minister’s Literary awards are the richest in the country, with a tax-free prize pool of $600,000.
Each category offers up to $100,000: $80,000 for the winner and $5,000 for up to four shortlisted entries.