Charlotte Wood Wins australian Stella Prize 2016

Charlotte Wood has been announced as winner of the 2016 Stella Prize for her novel 'The Natural Way of Things' at a ceremony that took place at the Sydney Opera House on Tuesday. The winner received $50,000, sponsored this year by National Australia Bank. The winning novel will be published in the UK and North America this year and the novel has already been optioned as a feature film. 

​The Stella Prize celebrates Australian women’s contribution to literature. It was awarded for the first time in 2013 to Carrie Tiffany for Mateship with Birds. In 2014, the winner was Clare Wright for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, and in 2015 the winner was Emily Bitto for The Strays.

Brenda Walker, Chair of the 2016 judging panel, says of the winning book:
“The Natural Way of Things is a novel of – and for – our times, explosive yet written with artful, incisive coolness. It parodies, with steely seriousness, the state of being visible and female in contemporary Western society.

“With an unflinching eye and audacious imagination, Charlotte Wood carries us from a nightmare of helplessness and despair to a fantasy of revenge and reckoning. The Natural Way of Things is a riveting and necessary act of critique.”
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