‘Serious consequences for Australian democracy’: Author uses prize speech to warn against censorship
Australian author Michelle de Kretser has described feeling afraid of speaking publicly about the conflict in Gaza and warned against the serious consequences of censorship as she accepted the 2025 Stella Prize for her book Theory & Practice.
In her acceptance speech for the prestigious literary award, the Sri Lanka-born author said she believed truthful speech about what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is being shut down and accused the Australian government of being complicit with “material and diplomatic support”.
Author Michelle de Kretser.Credit: Steven Siewert
“That complicity has had serious consequences for Australian democracy. We’ve seen scholars, creatives and journalists silenced, their funding revoked and their contracts cancelled for expressing anti-genocide views ... We’ve seen our institutions and our media betray the principles they’re supposed to uphold,” she said.
“We’ve seen language suffer Orwellian distortions. We’ve seen our leaders pander to the anti-Arab racism of that global bully the United States. And all of this damage has been done to prop up Israel: a brazenly cruel foreign power, whose leaders are internationally wanted criminals.”
According to the Sydney-based author, the aim of this suppression is to intimidate.
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser.
“In Australia today it isn’t those applauding mass murder who have cause to be afraid, but those speaking out against it. Principally targeted are Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, First Nations people, people of colour, queers,” she said.
“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.”
“I’m still afraid. But I’ve just accepted a prize that is not about obedience. It’s not about feel-good narratives, it’s not about marketing, it’s not even about creativity – Stella is about changing the world.”
De Kretser receives $60,000 as part of the annual award, set up to provide recognition for female and, latterly, non-binary writers.
This year’s shortlisted works were Jumaana Abdu’s Translations, Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow, Santilla Chingaipe’s Black Convicts: How slavery shaped Australia, Amy McQuire’s Black Witness, and Samah Sabawi’s Cactus Pear For My Beloved.
Over 180 entries were received and assessed by judges Astrid Edwards, Debra Dank, Leah Jing Mcintosh and Rick Morton.
Speaking to this masthead, de Kretser said her book Theory & Practice “has always been waiting inside me somehow”.
“Of course every novel comes from within you ... but this really seemed to be meant in a way that I hadn’t encountered before.”
The work follows a young woman in the mid-1980s Melbourne working on a master’s thesis about novelist Virginia Woolf. De Kretser said there were ideas in the book she had been thinking about for decades, and others prompted by much more recent events.
It plays with form by beginning as a conventional novel, written in the third-person, then changes to first-person. Several non-fiction devices are used that make the book appear as a memoir, such as diary entries, first-hand memoir-like passages and letters. About 80 per cent of the book is fiction, she says, describing it as “a novel that doesn’t read like a novel”.
“Everything that happens in St Kilda for instance is pure fiction, apart from of course references to real people like Virginia Woolf. The narrator says ‘I want to write a novel that doesn’t read like a novel’, and I think that is what I have done.”
The announcement of the Stella Prize winner was open to the public for the first time as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival on Friday evening.
In her video acceptance speech, de Kretser – who couldn’t attend as she is touring her book in the UK – thanked her fellow nominees “for the many ways in which you reconfigure our understanding and our literature”.
She went on to say she has been thinking about two groups of women lately, the first being the founders of the Stella, “who decided to make the world a more equitable place, and whose activism resulted, against the odds, in the Stella Prize and the transformation of our literary landscape”.
The other group are the women and girls of Gaza. “They’re the women and girls murdered, maimed, starved, raped, tortured, terrorised, orphaned, bereaved, incarcerated, dehumanised, displaced… war crimes for which Australia provides material and diplomatic support,” she continued.
Speaking to this masthead, de Kretser implored others to speak out.
“It shows you the limits of our democracy. That’s why I am begging more people to speak out – because they can’t go for us all.”
De Kretser has won the Miles Franklin Award twice - in 2018 for The Life to Come and in 2013 for Questions of Travel, which was short-listed for the Stella and also won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction that year. She says the kindness and decency of people in Australia gives her hope.
To her mind, Australians traditionally support the underdog. “People do not like to see people getting kicked,” she said.
“Perhaps it’s a myth, but it is part of our folklore that we stand up for the weak and not the oppressor. I see that people can speak up for Palestine because they are morally outraged, they know instinctively [what is happening] is wrong.”
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