Maxine Beneba Clarke, Emily Bitto and Ellen Van Neerven named on six-strong list for Australia’s leading literary award for women writers
Three debut authors have made the shortlist for the 2015 Stella prize, the Australian literary award celebrating women’s writing.
Performance poet Maxine Beneba Clarke’s first short story collection, Foreign Soil, joins Brisbane writer Ellen van Neerven’s three-part debut, Heat and Light, and Emily Bitto’s novel, The Strays – a story of a young girl’s infatuation with an artist’s colony in 1930s Melbourne – on the six-strong list. Beneba Clarke has previously published poetry collections Gil Scott Heron is on Parole and Nothing Here Needs Fixing, but this is the first time she has authored a short story collection.
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