
Debut poet Evelyn Araluen has won the 2022 Stella Prize for her incredible poetry collection, Dropbear. This year marks 10 years of the Stella Prize, with the winner announced at a special ceremony at the State Library of Victoria last night, hosted by actor and producer Claudia Karvan.
Evelyn Araluen is a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation who was born and raised on Dharug country. As well as being a poet, she is a researcher and co-editor of the Overland Literary Journal, who has won numerous accolades for her criticism, fiction and poetry (including the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship, and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant).
2022 also marks the very first year that poetry is eligible for the prize, making Araluen’s win all the more remarkable. Melissa Lucashenko, the 2022 Chair of Judges, said of the winning book,
“When you read Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear you’ll be taken on a wild ride. Like the namesake of its title, this collection is simultaneously comical and dangerous. If you live here and don’t acquire the necessary local knowledge, the drop bear might definitely getcha! But for those initiated in its mysteries, the drop bear is a playful beast, a prank, a riddle, a challenge and a game. Dropbear is remarkably assured for a debut poetry collection, and I think we can safely say it announces the arrival of a stunning new talent to Australian literature. Congratulations, Evelyn.”
Araluen said of her win,
“Winning the Stella Prize is literally a dream come true. I’ve been following the prize for years – for the length of my own writing aspirations. I hoped that one day I’d be able to write a novel good enough to be considered, and when I wrote Dropbear I never imagined it would be considered for such a celebrated award. I’m deeply interested in the lives, histories, and dreams of women and gender diverse writers in Australian publishing, and it’s an honour to be recognised by a prize designed to champion those stories. There aren’t words to explain how thrilled I am to win.”
Evelyn Araluen will take home $60,000 in prize money.
Congratulations to Evelyn Araluen, the 2022 Stella Prize winner!
Find out more about the Stella Prize here

Dropbear
This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury.
Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality.
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Olivia Fricot
Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.
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