Debut poet Evelyn Araluen has won the $60,000 Stella Prize, Australia's literary award for women and non-binary writers, for her collection Dropbear. This marks the first year poetry was eligible for the prize, and Araluen is the first poet to win it.
Araluen says the prize money will allow her to drop one of her three part-time jobs, but she stresses that 'this cannot be the way we sustain the arts.' She wrote Dropbear while 'one paycheck away from complete poverty,' editing the collection on the only piece of furniture in her flat—a desk. She and her partner moved to Melbourne just before the 2020 lockdowns, struggling to find work and afford furniture.
The win is a milestone for poetry, which was previously excluded from the award, ruling out many women and non-binary writers, particularly people of colour. Araluen hopes her win encourages publishers to take risks on poetry. Her debut collection, Dropbear, reimagines kitschy Australiana and children's books, and consciously addresses an Aboriginal reader—a perspective often overlooked, says Araluen, a Bundjalung descendant.
The poems blend 'rage and dreaming,' exploring family, love, and survival, including an 'Inevitable Pandemic Poem.' Araluen is now working on a 'fictocritical novel' about sexism and racism in 20th-century Australian publishing, which the prize money will support. She finds it 'mind-blowing' to join past winners like Alexis Wright, whose work on Indigenous land rights reached new audiences.
