Our favourite books written by Australian women.

The Stella Prize is calling on book-lovers to share their favourite books by Australian women in a new campaign, Stella Sparks.

What was the book by an Australian woman that inspired you, provoked you or moved you?

How about the one that made you think or made you laugh, or the one that made you passionate about writing?

That’s your Stella Spark — and they’d love you to post a picture of it or even just a few words about it on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, using the hashtag #StellaSpark.

These are some of ours.

Alys

My Stella Spark would be Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent. An extraordinary piece of writing. I wailed at the end of it, it stirred too much emotion in me.

Also, The Engagement, by Chloe Hooper. I started reading it one night, about 8pm and I literally read it in one go. I finished at about 2am in the morning. It was terrifying, completely gripping.

Holly

One of my absolute favourite books by a female Australian is The Secret River by Kate Grenville. It’s an immensely vivid and readable story that shows bloody Australian history in deeply human terms. I think about it all time.

In a similar vein is a book called The Dig Tree by Sarah Murgatroyd. I think she might have originally been English, but became Australian (just like me). It’s about Burke and Wills and is another incredibly vivid, very human book about white Australian history that has a broad and uncompromising view. It’s also an incredible adventure story. Sarah died young, of cancer, but that book, and the research it would have take to complete, is an impressive legacy.

Another one is The Tall Man, by Chloe Hooper. It’s about the death in custody on Palm Island of Cameron Doomadgee, and the court case that followed it. Hooper is a beautiful writer, but also an impressive reporter, and the Doomadgee family gave her a lot of access for her book. It’s a depressing, and brilliant, portrait of black and white police relations in the far north, and another book that has stayed with me.

One more, which brings my collection a bit full circle — My Place by Sally Morgan. I think Aussie kids read this at school? But I read it in my first years in Australia 200 years ago, and probably like a school kid, I was learning about indigenous Australia and it was an accessible family history that taught me a lot.

All of these books have “sparked” me in different ways, they’ve fed my own continuing need to understand my adopted homeland, and inspire me that beautiful story-telling can teach without lecturing.

Amy

Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow was young adult fiction before anyone cared about young adult fiction. It’s the perfect Australian story. It gripped me when I was a pre-teen and it grips me as an adult. I reread it every year.

Monique

Long before she was on Big Brother, Gretel Killeen wrote books. And these books spoke to me like nothing had before. Her young adult series, My Life Is A Toilet and My Life Is A Wedgie, followed the misadventures of Fleur Trotter and her shit haircuts and her small boobs and weird boys and odd family. And after a steady diet of Baby Sitter Club books, and those Sweet Valley High Twins with their perfect blonde hair and perfect teeth and perfect lives, laughing at Fleur Trotter made me want to write, and draw, and be OK with my small boobs and shit hair. Thanks, Gretel.

Alexis

Ruth Park’s Playing Beattie Bow and The Harp in the South novels

I fell in love with Ruth Park’s writing after reading Playing Beattie Bow in high school — it sparked my imagination hugely, and I loved her ability to transport the reader through time, and write realistically about colonial Sydney. I went on to read her Harp in the South novels and they are just as brilliant.

Alex

I loved the desolate story of Agnes Magnusdottir, as imagined by Hannah Kent in Burial Rites. Magnusdottir was the last woman condemned to death in Iceland, in 1829, for her part in the murder of two men. Kent’s novel completely brings to life the forbidding landscape of rural Iceland and the brief and brutal life of a woman whose love was constantly betrayed. The novel was a revelation to me — set in a place I’ve never been to, in a time I could’t relate to, about a woman I’d never heard of — yet it was the most compelling thing I’d read in a long time. The way Kent wove historical fact into the story made me wonder how many other women’s stories are out there to be told.

Jo

I think I was in late primary school when I first read Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody. My older sister gave it to me and I read the whole thing in a day. I’ve read it countless times since then — not to mention its sequels — while waiting for the Carmody to finish the series. I felt so much recognition for the teenage protagonist Elspeth Gordie, even though she lived in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and could communicate telepathically with her cat. The story for me always carried a strong anti-authoritarian undertone and themes of sustainability, diversity and tolerance.

Sarah Jane

How does anyone pick just one?

I am gonna go with The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow by Thea Astley. I love Astley’s prose, but more than that I love the way she melds fiction and history and her ability to capture landscape so vividly.

Kahla

Looking For Alibrandi 

I can’t remember how old I was when I first read it — probably not even in high school — but Looking for Alibrandi really nailed the experience of coming of age in Australia. It helped me appreciate that good stories don’t require huge, dramatic plot twists or other-worldly settings — ‘ordinary’ and universal experiences can be just as powerful.

Lucy

Anything by Helen Garner – but in particular, her non-fiction works This House of Grief and Joe Cinque’s Consolation, both of which are based on true crime stories from Australia. There’s something about the way Garner captures and explores human emotions. She writes and I listen.

Give me a Kate Morton book and I leave the house until it’s finished. It sounds cliché but Morton writes page turners; the kind of novels that consume you in the most beautiful way possible. Her stories generally follow the same theme — a character in the present, a character in the past and some kind of mystery drawing the two together. My favourite? The Forgotten Garden.

What’s your choice?

The Stella Prize is Australia’s foremost literary organisation celebrating writing by Australian women.

Champions of diversity, their goal is to honour exceptional female writers, nurture budding talent and drive conversations about gender equality, diversity and cultural change in Australian literature.

You can find out more about the Stella Sparks campaign (as well as a handy how-to guide) or donate to the Stella Prize here.