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ABC News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
All the snubs, surprises and favourites from the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist
The shortlist for the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award — Australia's most prestigious literary prize — features a dual winner (Michelle de Kretser), two repeat shortlistees (Brian Castro and Fiona McFarlane), and three writers shortlisted for the first time (Julie Janson, Siang Lu and debut author Winnie Dunn). Tim Winton, longlisted for his dystopian cli-fi thriller Juice, missed out on the shortlist and his chance to bag a fifth Miles Franklin award. The shortlist has grown increasingly diverse in recent years, and 2025 is no exception, with five writers of colour in the running for the $60,000 award. Female writers have also dominated the prize in the past decade. If Castro or Lu win, it will be the first time a male author has taken out the award since 2016, when AS Patrić won for his debut novel, Black Rock White City. Last year, Waanyi writer Alexis Wright won for Praiseworthy, an epic novel set in northern Australia that also took out the Stella Prize. This year's winner will be announced on July 24. To take a closer look at the shortlist, we've brought together The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange, The Bookshelf's Kate Evans, and writer and critic Declan Fry. Sarah L'Estrange: Each of the six books investigates race, class and gender in contemporary Australia but in different ways. It's very hard to compare books like Ghost Cities and Dirt Poor Islanders because they're written in such distinct ways, but they both encourage us to think about narrative and who owns stories. Declan Fry: I was surprised to see Highway 13 on the list — it's a short story collection. That's a first, and it could be the most radical thing the Miles Franklin has ever done. I'm here for it — I love to see the definition of the novel always expanding. Claire Nichols: We're getting a novel competition that is moving further from the traditional novel form. DF: Many of these novels are also quite formless. Kate Evans: I like the fact that they're not afraid to include things that are a bit difficult. I thought this shortlist was more interesting than some of the shortlists we've seen recently because they're not all conventional narratives. CN: The list leaves me a little cold. I wanted to see Tim Winton make it. We know he doesn't need another Miles Franklin — he already has four — but I thought Juice was an exciting novel. It was Winton outside his comfort zone, writing a speculative fiction story. There was a great urgency to the writing and a thrilling plot there, too. It felt like a big moment in his writing career. I also wanted to see The Burrow make it. This tiny, perfect novel by Melanie Cheng, did so much with so little: one family, a rabbit, COVID and grief. I thought it was a gorgeous piece of traditional novel writing. SL: Perhaps not a traditional Miles Franklin novel, Woo Woo by Ella Baxter is about a woman on the edge and I found it enjoyable and vital. Catherine McKinnon's To Sing of War is another one that didn't even make the longlist — I thought that was a wonderful book. CN: There's been an explosion of own-voices fiction in Australia in the last five to 10 years, and I think Dirt Poor Islanders is up there with the best examples of the genre. SL: It was a pleasure to read. It felt like Ruth Park's Harp in the South for our times, an entrée for most of Australia into this small Tongan Australian community. It's charming, it doesn't pull its punches and, while it might seem like a simple story because it presents as semi-autobiographical, I appreciated the layers as well. DF: It's a very honest book; it has a lot of integrity. One thing I loved was the self-deprecating and ironic humour. There's pathos in it too. Meadow's dreams are limited by the structural constraints on her family's lives. CN: It's a fascinating study of motherhood. The narrator, Meadow, just like Winnie Dunn, lost her mother very young, but in Tongan culture everyone is a mother, so the grandmother and all the aunties are her mother as well. I admired the liveliness of the writing, and I love how tactile it is — you can smell the food, and you can feel the sweat and how crowded that house is in Mount Druitt, full of all those aunties. KE: Theory & Practice starts as one thing, which is an archetypal Australian outsider narrative, and then it ditches that and becomes something else, which is the story of a young woman in the 1980s, immersed in the Melbourne academic world of both theory and practice. This is one I've read twice, and I read it differently the second time. The first time I was struck by the deftness and the humour of it. When I re-read it, I felt like I was reading into other layers of the work. The more you look at it, the more it offers you. SL: I feel like it wore its seriousness heavily, Kate! KE: Oh, you didn't find it funny? SL: I read it as a sad-girl novel — it has all the elements. This one, though, is set in 1980s Melbourne. A woman disaffected is looking back over her life, finding it hard to find her place, having relationships with the wrong men, knowing that she shouldn't be, but still doing it. DF: I didn't care for the interrupted narrative at the beginning, but I did think it was cool that de Kretser has an 'I' who says, 'My novel was failing, so I decided to do something different.' That makes it sound like de Kretser is speaking to us but of course, it's not her, it's an authorial persona. I thought that was clever. CN: And she's put her own picture on the cover of the book! She's playing with the expectations of what we look for in fiction, which I find so fascinating when you compare it to something like Winnie Dunn's book, which is just straight-up autobiography. There's no veil there for Dunn, but de Kretser is hiding herself in the book. KE: The main character of Chinese Postman lives in the Adelaide Hills. He's alienated people, he loves his dogs, he's telling stories, he's surrounded by piles of books. You could easily make the case that what Castro is doing here is telling stories from his own life and playing around with his identity — he was a postman and he's also Chinese, Portuguese and Jewish, but unlike female writers, male writers aren't generally labelled as autobiographical novelists. DF: I like his debut, Birds of Passage, a lot. It felt the freest of his books. This one is perhaps the most diaristic and fragmented, even though many of them have mixed theory, fiction and biographical elements. KE: That's a warning we should make to readers — this is not a plot-driven novel. It's a novel of ideas. It's one of those books in which nothing happens and everything happens, which I like, but you have to be in the right mode to read it. You can read it like reading James Joyce: start in the middle, read fragments, read it back and forwards. A novel can be hard work and still be worth reading. CN: I'm Team Ghost Cities. I love Australian fiction that surprises you and I like Australian authors who take a big swing, and Siang Lu did that with his first novel, The Whitewash. It was hysterically funny and weird and had something important to say about race in Australia. Ghost Cities is just as experimental and wild, just as silly yet serious. Any book that has a guy who has been fired from his job as a translator because he was using Google Translate and then gets picked up by a film director called Baby Bao to work on a film in a place called Port Man Tou — that is all funny, weird stuff that excites me. There's also this gorgeous romance at the centre of it, which feels very true. There's another section about an ancient Chinese dynasty exploring ideas around art and creation. It's told in this mythic style, and I loved that too. Siang Lu is doing things that no other author in Australia is doing. DF: I have problems with the ending; I don't think he quite sticks the landing. It just ends rather than concluding satisfyingly. SL: It's not an easy read if you don't connect with the fable-like narrative style. You can be left flailing — but there are enough anchors to take you through, and the elements come together like a good puzzle. KE: I love the fact that a competition about showing Australian life in all its aspects includes Chinese cities and multiple identities. DF: I second what Kate says — I want to see more Chinese language in Australian fiction. For many people in the big cities, you hear Mandarin as much as English, and this book is filled with Mandarin. DF: It's lovely to see a small publisher, Magabala Books in particular, on the shortlist. SL: Compassion is a sequel to Julie Janson's 2020 novel, Benevolence, which was about a young Darug woman named Muraging, also called Mary James, growing up in the NSW colony in the 1800s. This book is about her daughter Duringah, or Nellie James, and she's based on Janson's great-great grandmother who showed up in court records over the years for stealing cattle and sheep. CN: Nellie has been a fighter since she was a kid. She's fighting against these men who inflict violence on her and enslave her. What I appreciated about this character was her utter fury and rage about the injustice of the life that she lives. She never settles and she never accepts it, and I found that appealing in a book that is quite confrontational. DF: I think this is the big talking point — how did a short story collection get onto the shortlist? KE: I read it as a novel. Each story addresses the same subject in an interestingly lateral way — this serial killer based on Ivan Milat, but McFarlane gives him a different name, Paul Biga. I like the way it explores the repercussions of a terrible event without just focusing on the families of victims or the cops, although they're in there as well. She also manages to slide in questions about the ethics of crime and true crime, which is so problematic. SL: I appreciated her agility as a writer to go from one set of characters and leap to another to create this portrait around a central figure who's never present. Like with Ghost Cities, you're trying to put the puzzle together. In each of the stories, you're primed as a reader: you're thinking, 'How does this relate to the crime? What are the connections?' And you have to stick with it to get the reward of working out what the connection is, even if it's very tenuous. DF: Fiona McFarlane's a lovely stylist. The prose is consistently very strong and I like how she plays with form. SL: I'd be happy if Highway 13 or Dirt Poor Islanders won. DF: My favourite was Theory & Practice, but Dirt Poor Islanders would be my left-field pick. CN: Michelle de Kretser has already won the Stella Prize this year — I don't think we want to see another calendar year where we have the same winner of both the Stella and the Miles Franklin. I'd love to see the wealth spread around. I'm going for Ghost Cities — I don't think it's a perfect book, but I love its ambition and that it's different and fun on what is a somewhat stodgy list. KE: I'll say Highway 13 for the win. It's a book that throws the form up in the air.
The Guardian
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Speaking out on Gaza: Australian creatives and arts organisations struggle to reconcile competing pressures
When Michelle de Kretser accepted the 2025 Stella prize on 23 May, the celebrated author shared a warning. 'All the time I was writing these words, a voice in my head whispered, 'You will be punished. You will be smeared with labels as potent and ugly as they're false,'' De Kretser told the Sydney writers' festival crowd. ''Career own goal,' warned the voice.' Earlier in her prerecorded speech, De Kretser had denounced what she called a 'program of suppression' against creatives, scholars and journalists for 'expressing anti-genocide views' in relation to Israel and Gaza. The speech received a standing ovation. It had been taped weeks earlier but arrived in the immediate fallout of exactly the kind of episode De Kretser was talking about. Three days before the Stella announcement, the Martu author KA Ren Wyld revealed she had been stripped of a $15,000 black&write! fellowship from the State Library of Queensland, just hours before it was due to be announced. A day earlier, the library's board received a written direction from the Queensland arts minister, John-Paul Langbroek, expressing his 'firm view' that Wyld should not receive the prize because of a Twitter post about the death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in October, which referred to him as a martyr who was 'resisting colonisation until his last breath, fighting the genocidal oppressors like a hero, sacrificing his life for love of his people and ancestral land'. Wyld has said she was not fully aware of Sinwar's Hamas ties at the time of posting. By the time De Kretser's speech aired, several judges of the library's Queensland Literary awards quit in protest. Sara El Sayed, an Egyptian Australian author and three-time judge was one of them. She says the minister's intervention 'undermines the whole process' of independent judging and makes it 'impossible to continue to work with the library'. 'I don't know how someone supporting the Palestinian people, supporting an oppressed people, people who are facing starvation, genocide every day … I just don't understand how the reaction is to take an opportunity away,' El Sayed says. 'That's the ultimate form of censorship, to me.' El Sayed says many artists now grapple with a choice between taking career opportunities and standing up for their beliefs. 'I think a lot of people, especially artists, feel a moral obligation to speak out against what is occurring,' she says. A State Library spokesperson said the library 'respects the decision of judges' and 'value[s] the conversations we have had with many judges and the writing community and acknowledge the concerns they have raised'. The Wyld case highlights a growing crisis for arts organisations and their management in how they respond to political statements that range from mild to polarising, but may be entirely unconnected to the subject matter of the artist's work. From the Khaled Sabsabi-Creative Australia furore to pianist Jayson Gillham's dispute with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO), arts institutions have struggled to reconcile commitments to intellectual freedom and creative expression with official positions of political neutrality and intense scrutiny from media and politicians, who in some cases may have an influence on their funding. At the MSO, the fallout has included the resignation of its longtime chief executive, high-profile event postponements and a long legal battle. The employment lawyer Josh Bornstein, who has represented the journalist Antoinette Lattouf in her unlawful termination case against the ABC over online posts about Gaza, says in his view a 'cancel culture' fostered by pressure from sections of the media, politicians and lobby groups is leading organisations to make fast, panicked decisions. 'An organisation goes into brand management mode and the usual denouement in the post-October 7 atmosphere is to eliminate the source of complaints from the organisation,' he says, speaking generally. But Bornstein also points to the University of Queensland's treatment of the UQP publisher Aviva Tuffield, who wore a 'Readers and Writers Against the Genocide' T-shirt to the Australian Book Industry Awards in May. In response to questions from The Australian, the university said its freedom of speech policy allowed Tuffield to express her lawful, personal views, which did not represent the university's. 'That's the sort of approach that should be adopted,' Bornstein says. Louise Adler is a veteran publisher and artistic director who faced criticism for programming Palestinian voices long before 7 October 2023, including Susan Abulhawa, who called the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a 'Nazi-promoting Zionist' in a social media post. Adler says many arts organisations have tried to abstain from the issue of the war in Gaza, despite demands by many artists that they take a position and defend the artists' right to speak. 'The tensions between the boards, the management and the artists have only increased, and one arts organisation after another has either publicly buckled or privately preemptively buckled on the pretext that art is not political,' Adler says. Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion 'Of course, insisting on silence on the conflict in the Middle East issue is a deeply political position – it's just one that suits particular interest groups. 'The problem for arts organisations is that artists – not all artists, but many artists – want to speak to the issues of the day. So when arts managers and their boards fail to protect the right of artists to speak, a principle that should be sacrosanct, one has to question whether they have lost sight of the fundamentals.' Adler says there are some free speech frontiers that no publicly funded arts festival or organisation would cross, but the conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the conflation of support for Palestine with support for terrorism, has made organisations shy away from defending artists' freedom of expression. 'I think there are lines for all of us; certainly in my current role, or when I was a publisher, I am not going to offer the microphone to people who are involved in hate speech or incitement to violence or racism. I don't think that's a question of free speech. 'No decent person wants to be accused of antisemitism, of any kind of racism. But once criticism of Israel is conflated with antisemitism … you've successfully manufactured the catalogue of silenced artists we have witnessed in recent years.' As with Creative Australia in response to the Sabsabi controversy, the State Library of Queensland announced an independent review following the withdrawal of Wyld's fellowship, the terms of which are still being prepared. It's the latest in a pattern of reviews and consultations in the wake of contentious decision-making. Earlier this year the State Library of Victoria unveiled a 'Ways of Working' framework, developed after it canned a Teen Writing Bootcamp in 2024. Freedom of information requests subsequently revealed that library management had scrutinised the social media posts of the three authors who were due to lead the workshops for content related to the Israel-Hamas war. In a statement the State Library of Victoria said it was 'crucial that we are a place of freedom of expression and respect for all', and that the 'sector-leading' framework established 'mutual obligations between the Library and anyone who works with us'. Since January, writers and artists engaged by the library have been obliged to agree that when making public statements, they 'clearly state that these views and opinions do not reflect or represent the views or positions of State Library Victoria, or any other person, company or organisation' from the moment a contract is signed. Jinghua Qian, one of the writers involved in the 2024 bootcamp, remains sceptical. 'If you contract someone for a one-hour panel or workshop, do you have the right to limit, police and punish them for their creative expression outside of that booking?' Qian wrote on Bluesky. For some creatives, these decisions expose contradictions in institutions that have tried to diversify their audiences and offer a platform to previously under-represented voices. Days before De Kretser's Stella speech, Nam Le, the newly crowned book of the year winner at the New South Wales Literary awards, asked a Sydney audience whether the 'goal of multiculturalism should be coexistence or cohesion'. 'If cohesion, how do we make sure that 'social cohesion' doesn't become 'social coercion' – a means of preserving the status quo, of preserving power?' Le asked, in a speech delivered by his manager. Like De Kretser's, Le's words would only become more pointed as the week progressed. 'What good is harmony if it only and always exists on terms dictated by power? If it's built on injustice, or enforced civility – enforced silence?'
ABC News
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Michelle de Kretser wins 2025 Stella Prize for Theory & Practice, her genre-busting seventh novel
Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most decorated authors, has won the 2025 Stella Prize, worth $60,000, for her novel Theory & Practice. It's a case of third time lucky for the Sri Lankan-born author, who has been twice shortlisted for the Stella, a literary award for women and non-binary writers established in 2013. (That year, Questions of Travel was shortlisted and The Life to Come followed in 2018. Both novels went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award). Theory & Practice follows an unnamed narrator in her 20s studying for a postgraduate degree and living a bohemian life in grungy St Kilda. Much conjecture has been made regarding just how autobiographical the novel is. Is it memoir? Is it autofiction? And does the distinction matter? De Kretser doesn't think so. "It doesn't seem to me like the most interesting question you could ask about the book," she tells ABC Arts. But the fact that the novel has left readers guessing what is fact and what is fiction is a testament to its success. "I succeeded in doing what I set out to do, which is to write a novel that doesn't read like a novel; that reads like fact, like life captured on the wing," de Kretser says. The novel opens with what turns out to be a fragment of what de Kretser calls "conventional fiction": a young Australian geologist, travelling in Switzerland in 1957, daydreams about a beguiling music teacher he met in London. But then, on page 12, the narrator suddenly intercedes in the story: "At that point, the novel I was writing stalled." What follows reads like a memoir as de Kretser uses forms associated with non-fiction, such as letters, diaristic prose and essays, to create the sense of verisimilitude. The candid authorial voice written in the first person makes it easy to forget that Theory & Practice is a work of fiction — and that was the point. "I was drawing all the time on the techniques of non-fiction to write fiction. I think that is something that isn't done very often," de Kretser says. "It was deliberate, to make people think this is truth; this is reality. Of course, anyone who knows me knows that my life is different from the life that's described in [the novel]. But of course, most readers don't know me." Through the narrator, de Kretser signposts her intention early on: "I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth." Adding to the illusion of realism is the cover, which features a photo of de Kretser, taken in 1986, above the words, "The new novel". "I think this is very clever of the designer [WH Chong] because what that is saying is, 'Here is a photo of a real person, but it's only a representation of reality,'" she says. De Kretser likens the effect to that of René Magritte's famous 1929 painting of a pipe titled The Treachery of Images, also known as This Is Not a Pipe. "[The message is] the representation of reality in art is not reality," de Kretser says. "It mimics it." Given her reading list at the start of the semester, the narrator discovers in her time away from study "French post-structuralist theory — Theory — had conquered the humanities". Suddenly, she had to read "texts" (not books) in a completely new way. "Theory … posited that meaning was unstable and endlessly deferred." De Kretser has drawn on her own experience in 80s academia. "Being at Melbourne Uni in the 1980s, where capital-T post-structuralist Theory absolutely ruled the roost, at least in the English department, I was interested in how one applied theory to literary practice," de Kretser told ABC Radio National's The Book Show. The novel explores the "messy gap" between the two in many facets of life, as it relates to Israeli military strategy or university social dynamics. But it's a tension that plays out most dramatically in the narrator's romantic life. As a feminist, she believes she shouldn't feel emotions like anger and jealousy towards other women. But when her ex leaves her for the "smart, good-looking, outspoken" Lois, her rage is directed towards the woman rather than her ex. Later, when she embarks on an affair with an engineering student named Kit, she feels only a mix of triumph and scorn when she thinks about his girlfriend Olivia, highlighting the gulf between the idealism of feminist solidarity and the messiness of real-life relationships. De Kretser says these kinds of conflicted feelings are fertile ground for fiction. "It reveals the gap between [the narrator's] values and her ideals — she's a feminist — and her practice: what's going on in her life, where she constructs the other woman … as a rival and is jealous of her. "It makes her a multifaceted, complex character and speaks to the novel's theme of theory and practice." Theory & Practice is also in conversation with the late fiction of Virginia Woolf, whom de Kretser describes as a "towering" literary figure. "She did adventurous things with form, but she also theorised women's lives, famously in A Room of One's Own," she says. "And then she lived a very unconventional life herself [as] part of the Bloomsbury set." The narrator of Theory & Practice is writing her thesis on Woolf's 1937 novel, The Years. "In her original idea for that novel, Woolf intended to write a fictional chapter followed by an essay, fictional chapter followed by an essay [and so on]," de Kretser says. "She wrote about 100,000 words along those lines and then abandoned it. I don't exactly know why, but I'm guessing it was just too schematic for Woolf. "But I liked that idea; I thought, 'OK, that's something I could take up.' I didn't like the very rigid structure of fiction, non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction; I thought you could mix that up a bit." Taking her cue from Woolf, de Kretser settled on a hybrid form that blends fiction, essay and memoir. But while Theory & Practice offers a homage to Woolf, it's also a critique. The novel shows Woolf as a flawed figure. Reading Woolf's diaries, the narrator comes across a 1917 entry describing EW Perera, a leading member of the Sri Lankan independence movement, as a "poor little mahogany-coloured wretch". It's a moment of intense disappointment for the narrator, who views the modernist writer as a sort of maternal figure: her "Woolfmother". De Kretser says she wanted to explore our relationships with figures we admire, such as Woolf, who don't live up to our expectations. "How do we deal with that?" she asks. "Woolf, a brilliant theorist of women's lives, seeing how women under patriarchy are oppressed, simply could not extend that view to thinking about how colonial people were oppressed, for instance, even though she was married to a man who had served in the empire and was an anti-imperialist. Stella CEO Fiona Sweet describes de Kretser's winning novel as "another example of the depth of her talent as a writer". In their report, the 2025 Stella Prize judges described it as "a brilliantly auto fictive knot, composed of the shifting intensities and treacheries of young love, of complex inheritances both literary and maternal, of overwhelming jealousies and dark shivers of shame". In 2025, the Stella Prize received more than 180 entries. It was the first year the Stella shortlist featured books exclusively by women of colour. De Kretser says she's thrilled to have finally won the prize.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Michelle de Kretser wins Stella prize for book that ‘expands our notions of what a novel can be'
'I wouldn't say I set out to break forms, as to invent new ones,' Michelle de Kretser says of her novel Theory and Practice, winner of the $60,000 Stella prize for women and non-binary writers. 'I wanted to write a novel where the reader thinks it isn't a novel because I'm using nonfictional devices and forms.' Tricksy and sly, Theory and Practice – the Australian author's eighth novel – troubles the line between fiction and memoir. It opens with several pages of another ostensibly unrelated novel that is abandoned in its early stages; the reader simply turns a page and is confronted with the line: 'At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.' What comes after seems suspiciously like memoir – particularly to anyone vaguely familiar with de Kretser's biography – following a young Sri Lankan-Australian woman studying English literature at Melbourne University in the 1980s. The Stella prize judges called it 'a brilliantly auto-fictive knot' and 'a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living,' awarding it among a shortlist that included Amy McQuire's essay collection Black Witness, Melanie Cheng's novel The Burrow and Samah Sabawi's family memoir Cactus Pear For My Beloved. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Theory and Practice is also disarmingly quotidian, relatable – and funny. The protagonist drinks cheap wine, goes to parties and watches recondite arthouse films, falls in love and avoids her mother. But de Kretser is playing a complicated and penetrating game with the reader, provoking questions around the concept of mimesis, or the representation of reality. 'I would say about 80 to 85% of my novel is fiction,' says the author. While she did attend Melbourne University in the 1980s, she didn't study English literature; nor did she undertake a thesis on Virginia Woolf, as her protagonist does. 'That's one of the things the novel is saying: don't confuse the representation of reality with reality,' de Kretser says. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Theory and Practice also has a lot to say about legacy, about the things we inherit and the things we reject from our forebears, familial and literary. While Woolf remains an important feminist figure, she had a patrician view of class and could be quite racist, with an uncomfortably colonialist outlook on the world. The protagonist dubs her 'the Woolfmother', and she exerts a problematic influence second only to the character's own mother, who sends passive-aggressive letters to her daughter throughout. 'When you think about feminism, you think of course about mothers and daughters because that's the maternal line, it's the maternal legacy,' says de Kretser. The process of maturation is also a process of deconstruction and reformation, of grappling more honestly with the past. 'The narrator considers herself a feminist and yet she's been hurt by other women and will hurt other women in her turn,' says the author. That gap between our intent and our actions is exploited throughout Theory and Practice, as the narrator begins to obsess about her lover and then the woman who's also sleeping with him. The righteous feminist soon has to confront her own petty insecurities and jealousy – her decidedly un-feminist id – and the result is subtly hilarious. As much as de Kretser's crackling prose and probing intellectualism have wowed awards judges – her Stella win caps a tally that includes two Miles Franklin awards and three Christina Stead prizes – it's this wit, the levity and playfulness of her sentences, that makes her so fun to read. 'I think we confuse seriousness and solemnity. We think if it's funny, it must be trivial,' says de Kretser. 'For me, being funny is a way of being very serious.' In her novel, she pokes sly fun at those pesky post-structuralists – Derrida, Foucault et al – who took the idea of literary deconstruction to an absurd, and eventually meaningless, place. De Kretser remembers post-structuralism descending like a cloud on Melbourne University in the 80s: 'Suddenly theory became more important than literature.' And how did she find it? 'I just sort of skulked in corners. We were all scared.' She laughs at the memory, but you can almost sense the chill run down her spine. Entertaining and intellectual, Theory and Practice is the kind of novel that – like most of de Kretser's work – will not only bear rereading, but benefit from it. The false novel that opens the book contains dark echoes of what is to come, but only on reflection. The themes of the book are layered on top of each other, but also spread outwards like tendrils. And that formal experimentation, so clever but judicious and perfectly calibrated, points the way for future works by the author. 'I quote Woolf to that effect in the novel. She says, 'I want to go on adventuring and changing'. And that is what any artist worth their salt wants to do,' says de Kretser. 'You want to keep yourself interested and intervene in the novel form. It's good to expand our notions of what a novel can be.'
