Stella women's literary prize picks battle with non-existent enemy as it fights 'male gender bias' in the book industry

Sky News AU

2 days ago

Australia's 2026 Stella Prize - for women authors - includes a male judge.
If inclusivity is embraced to the extent that gender is no impediment to judging a gender-specific prize, then inclusivity has been rendered relativist to the extent of being just ideology with good branding.
Paradoxically, it would be considered insensitive, in the current climate, to allege that a male judge was hindering representation and the distinctive voice of dozens of prospective female judges, whose lived experience and perspectives as women might make them inherently more suitable as a judge of a literary prize from which men are exempt as entrants.
The Stella Prize claims to fight for gender equality.
The Stella website says it 'takes an intersectional feminist approach to privilege and discrimination. We are committed to actively dismantling all structural barriers to inclusion for women and non-binary writers'.
This is a sociocultural delusion, ignoring that the publishing industry is disproportionately, almost overwhelmingly dominated by women - roughly 60 to 70 per cent of Australian novels published in recent years have been written by women.
The most up-to-date Lee & Low publishing survey found that 71 per cent of people in the US industry are women, including 74 per cent in editorial roles, 70 per cent of book reviewers, and 78 per cent of literary agents, with that number replicated in a scroll through the Australian Literary Agents Association website.
Stella boasts: "… Data-driven initiatives – including our long-running Stella Count - collect, analyse, and distribute research on gender bias in the Australian literary sector."
Looking at their reports, the findings indicate the systemic bias they allude to is an illusion: 55 per cent of the reviews in Australian newspapers and periodicals are of female authors, Stella's own report found.
Similarly, "gender distribution of reviewers by publication" found women leading in eight of the twelve sampled publications.
Benjamin Law, the male judge in question, is an Australian writer and broadcaster, and a founding member of the Australian Writers' Guild's Diversity and Inclusion Action Committee.
He read Jessie Tu's The Honeyeater and "thought it slapped hard."
And he is a massive Torrey Peters "stan".
Peters is the author of 'Detransition, Baby' - possibly the most insufferable, archly preening novel of the last ten years.
The socio-cultural carve-out here could feasibly be that the prize is also open to non-binary writers, which would open it up to LGBTQ authors, which could just about open it to Law.
After all, the prize states: "We recognise that what it means to be a woman is not static and that rigid gender binaries reinforce inequality," suggesting that lived experience as a girl or woman is not a prerequisite to win a woman-oriented literature prize.
From the submission criteria: "Entry is open to women and non-binary writers who identify with the Prize's purpose to promote Australian women's writing, in ways that align with the writer's own gender identity. This includes cis women, trans women and non-binary people."
In this regard, non-binary writers have been granted a cultural skeleton-key to enter practically any literary competition.
With the greatest sensitivity, in interviews and public profiles - including Men's Health, Star Observer, Sunday Guardian Live, SBS Voices, and Wikipedia – Mr Law consistently talks about being gay, with no mention of non binary identity.
So there is, at best, an absolutely tenuous connection to the stipulation of "promoting Australian women's writing, in ways that align with the writer's own gender identity".
At about this stage, the ideological prevarication and identity-sensitive pussyfooting will have turned your brain to mush.
Womanhood, we're told, is an immutable characteristic - rooted in unique, lived experience that demands nurturing and protection in a literary world vulnerable to male hegemony (a hegemony that, statistically, ceased to exist a decade ago). Simultaneously, womanhood is mutable - open to self-declared gender fluidity, to non-binary redefinition, to the idea of a gendered soul.
So, if you're a woman, submitting your manuscript to the women's only Stella prize, be conscious of the possibility of your work being assessed by a man - a culturally tuned-in, diverse, LGBTQ identifying published man - but a man, nonetheless.
By 2012, when the Stella Prize was introduced, Australian publishing was already female-majority across all layers of gatekeeping, from editors to publicists and agents.
In 2012, masculine themes (war, rural isolation, generational stoicism, etc.) were still critically respectable.
Even non-urban, non-identity-centric male stories had a place.
Literary agents were still receptive to quiet male protagonists, postcolonial masculine narratives, stories about fathers, veterans, male friendship, etc.
But these were already waning.
By 2012, diversity discourse was emerging forcefully.
Male-authored manuscripts that didn't engage identity themes were becoming less fashionable, especially if they lacked a distinct 'hook' (e.g., trauma, cultural hybridity, queerness, etc.).
There were already whispers in editorial circles about needing more 'own voices,' more 'underrepresented perspectives,' and less 'middle-aged white man navel-gazing.'
Now, there is a strong diversity / identity tilt, and increasing ambivalence to traditional masculinity, which almost always must be shouldered with quotation marks.
Masculine narrative spaces are borderline extinct, outside of genre writing.
Male writers in 2025, submitting literary fiction that reflects traditional or psychologically subtle masculinity, face less editorial enthusiasm, fewer agenting opportunities, and lower prize prospects, meaning the situation for men, is now worse than it was for women when they felt compelled to band together to create the women's only Stella prize for literature in 2012.
But even if someone instituted a male-only publishing prize - and imagine the opprobrium and scorn around that - It wouldn't occur to me to enter it, because any gender-specific prize, in 2025, is banal and dated.
Nicholas Sheppard is an accomplished journalist whose work has been featured in The Spectator, The NZ Herald and Politico. He is also a published literary author and public relations consultant