'Offshore' sparks acclaim from Stella Prize

The Kaldor Centre’s Madeline Gleeson has landed on the Stella Prize longlist for 2017 with her devastating account of Australia’s detention policy, Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru (NewSouth).

Gleeson’s book last week won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction. It was also a finalist for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and on the Walkley Awards longlist.

Each year the prestigious Stella Prize, named for Miles Franklin, celebrates writing by women in Australia. Fiction and non-fiction are judged together. This year the prize organisers announced a focus on non-fiction, where women are under-represented, with its Stella Sparks campaign, celebrating “the Australian women writers who speak truth to power, reshape our understanding of the world, and reveal unexpected truths about their lives – and ours.”

The Australian Book Review critic Peter Mares put Offshore on his 2016 Books of the Year “not because it makes pleasant reading, but because it comprehensively documents a reality we must face. Together with the Guardian’s Nauru Files and Four Corners’ ‘Forgotten Children’ exposé, Offshore leaves Australian citizens with nowhere to hide from the crimes committed in our name.” 

The Stella shortlist will be unveiled on 8 March and the $50,000 prize announced 18 April.  

Discover more Kaldor Centre work on offshore detention issues here.