Eunice Andrada and Ender Başkan have been shortlisted for the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Andrada is a finalist for her third collection KONTRA, which also won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, is shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and was longlisted for the Stella Prize. Başkan is shortlisted for his debut collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers, which won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Mary Gilmore Award and the ALS Gold Medal.

Read the judges’ comments below.

KONTRA by Eunice Andrada

Eunice Andrada’s powerful third collection, KONTRA, takes us into the tropical gothic world of female saints, the telenovela kontrabida, actresses, beauty queens and divas: a reliquary devoted to ‘what women know’ and the force of colonial allegories of sexual destiny and vengeance. 

A poetic exploration of ekphrasis, the representation of representation, structures the volume’s intermediation of female scenes, typologies, scripts and genealogies across different times and places in fulfilment of its guiding axiom: ‘The truth of the lyric moment / is in the execution / of the lyric moment’. 

The doubleness of ‘execution’ – severance and deadly technique – underwrites KONTRA’s reckoning with desire, fate and eloquence. The stakes are high in this gripping poetic melodrama. 

Unafraid of taking aesthetic risks, Andrada assembles her materials with acuity, precision and striking diction, enveloping her reader in a heady sensorium that is impressively formally controlled: ‘Close this book to join the girl wound / to the woman wound. Open these pages / to split the wounds apart.’

KONTRA moves skilfully between realist and symbolic registers, wielding the language of historic judgement, disobedience and vengeance in the name of righteous love: ‘Unveiled and unclouded / may my wrongs create’. 

Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan

Ender Başkan’s Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a timely and exquisitely crafted exploration of the arcs of love, joy and communion that guide us through our everyday lives, despite the precarities of the modern world. 

These poems reveal a curiosity about the complexities of our many and varied human relationships: with family, friends, neighbours, communities, colleagues, new acquaintances and strangers. Yet at the centre of this brilliant debut is love and care for two very young children who appear and reappear throughout the poems, fortifying a collection that chatters and hums with the wonder of new language. 

These are big-hearted poems that pull us close to the ‘I’ to witness the motions, mundanities and marvels of daily living, from navigating domestic responsibilities to enduring the repetitiveness of paid work, negotiating difficult neighbours to visiting his grandparents’ homeland with his young children. 

Cognisant of the creeping ruins of a world stultified by corporate greed and injustice, Başkan’s lines nevertheless gambol across observation, documentation and reflection with an expansive tongue, as if to set in motion a truly activist poetics, one that builds towards another possible, big-hearted world. 

As he writes, ‘how do we imagine other worlds if we only speak commodity?’ Indeed, taking cues from his children’s curious tongues, Başkan’s poems stretch through play with word, line and language, as if attempting to build a lexicon derived from origins of intimacy rather than ownership. 

This book is an invitation to play and to listen, to explore what might be possible if a line were to stretch between one person and another. In a world where there is much to be angry about, Two Hundred Million Musketeers greets despair with the full force of wonder and reciprocity. It is a book whose ‘bigness makes other people feel bigger’.

A poem from Askew by Andy Jackson (October 2026), his first collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with Human Looking.

Weathering

you begin to suspect you are already stone
each day a weight that does not shift with rest
with time alone or a fistful of supplements

                    thoughts become rubble, then a puff of dust
                    but the job offers keep coming, requests
                    for support, for words with heft or heat

as you sleep, a pebble drops into your chest
by day, random avalanches in your actual heart
a sedimentary need to be prone, quiescent

          it hurts to mineralise, a constant furnace and settling
          your only life hack, chronic endurance
          your five-year plan, the welcoming of moss

not trending or even relevant but weathering
because stones, you know, don’t lack feelings
they absorb them, are pure compressed existence

                    it’s a gift and a theft, this falling into earth
                    let it all accrete – work, memory, healing
                    life, seismic, is building your resume of loss
                    this slow erosion, your bedrock callin

Eunice Andrada and Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle have been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry in the 2026 Queensland Literary Awards. Andrada is a finalist for her third collection KONTRA, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and was longlisted for the Stella Prize. Butcher-McGunnigle is recognised for her book of prose poems Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama. The announcement was made on 29 July.

Read the judges’ comments below.

KONTRA by Eunice Andrada

A book of exceptional formal ambition and imaginative force, KONTRA enlarges the possibilities of the contemporary lyric. Through its deft interplay of lyric, persona and documentary fragments, the collection moves between the personal and the historical, the mythical and the contemporary, blurring the boundaries between them while sustaining a rare urgency throughout. These are poems of haunting and transformation, alive to the violence and love we carry with us. Andrada’s formal inventiveness arises naturally from the emotional and intellectual pressures of her work. Conceptually sophisticated and emotionally immediate, KONTRA is a work of astonishing clarity and enduring resonance.

Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

The voice at the core of this collection of prose poems is unique and striking. This is a book that warrants rereading: its phrases appear and reappear in ever more inventive ways as the poet adopts intricate and unpredictable patterns that are variously bleak, witty, playful and eerie. The collection endlessly recombines and repurposes language, finding in collage and repetition a form of transformation. The past inevitably returns across these poems, transformed always by the poet’s charismatic voice.

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory by Yumna Kassab (Giramondo Publishing, 2026). The book is Kassab’s first work of non-fiction since being named the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature.

It is an assumption of this writer that most people are familiar with the structure of a dictionary. Words are arranged alphabetically and if we do a Venn diagram comparing a dictionary and an encyclopaedia, there will be overlap.

It was my idea that a dictionary could tell the story of a person (me) in connection with a place (Parramatta) with enough flexibility to take in detours, digressions, musings and general quirkiness. I knew at the outset that the entries would be placed under titles and it would be fragmentary in spirit.

While a dictionary is known for its technical and functional parameters, it has been used creatively. For those interested in creative versions, there’s The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, which is not alphabetical at all, and then Léxico de Afinidades by Ida Vitale which I picked up on a 2022 trip to Uruguay and has just appeared in translation by Sean Manning.

Compendium. Lexicon. Encyclopaedia. Dictionary.

My efforts with Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory are too modest for it to be called an encyclopaedia. I am of the generation that knew the multi-volume encyclopaedia sets that some people had in their homes. I like the concept of a lexicon or compendium which need not be alphabetical, but my intention was to arrange A to Z so a dictionary it was going to be.

As for the presentation of this project. It consists of the full alphabet in this printed book and there is also a selection of letters (C, S, T, W, M, N, O, P) available on the Sydney Review of Books website so that a reading can be experienced a fragment at a time.

Lastly, all writing problems involve the dilemma of deciding when a project is done. I wrote from 1 December 2023 to 1 October 2024. Since then I have thought to add to this dictionary but I have drawn an arbitrary line, and in both a digital and physical form, the dictionary has been sent out to find its destiny in the world.

Below is a digital-only extension to Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory (Giramondo, 2026), written by acclaimed author Yumna Kassab. As Kassab writes in the first added entry, ‘imagine this dictionary is a house and a writer can keep adding to it, extension after extension, so that it is a project ongoing and endless.’ Kassab was the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature.

A Sequence of Ons

The temptation with a structure as open as a dictionary is to keep adding to it.

Imagine this dictionary is a house and a writer can keep adding to it, extension after extension, so that it is a project ongoing and endless.

The last fragment in the dictionarywas written on the 17^th of October, 2024.

There have been instances in the intervening eighteen months where I have thought just one fragment more but I resist and turn my attention elsewhere.

Permit this weakness today of a few fragments more that serve as a mini-extension and forgive me if I indulge the temptation of addition once more.

On Two Promotional Stories

Reading about Helen DeWitt turning down the Windham-Campbell Prize due to promotional obligations.

Reading that Mario Levrero was prickly about interviews. There is one in the Believer where he interviews himself.

Reading reading reading, not speaking and actually writing.

On Parramatta

60,000 words have been written. Enough, I would think.

On Escaping

You won’t escape. Don’t even try. The best title is No One Gets Out of This Alive.

On Protesting

Over a genocide, we’re expected to be silent.

On Genocide

Two and a half years and such reckless violence and the sensation of being adrift.

On Coming of Age in the War on Terror by Randa Abdel-Fattah

This book is a chef’s kiss.

On The Western Terrace

It is the curatorial spirit of Eleni Christou which has created the warmest place to gather over stories, weaving, dance, all types of art, and food.

This series held at PHIVE is beautiful and to Eleni I tip my hat.

On Frankenstein in Baghdad

How I wish I had read you in 2024 so I could’ve included this book by Ahmed Saadawi in the dictionary.

On the Giant Tasmanian Vampire Rabbit

Once upon a time a vampire that could shapeshift into a rabbit was discovered wearing flannel in the forests of Tasmania.

Some days the vampire was called Chris, some days it went by Missel.

On Obscurity

Much of life is shadows. Accept. Submit. The End.

Kathryn Crowcroft reflects on her debut book Tongue (October 2026), a hybrid work of lyrical non-fiction that explores how the organ has been cast as both sacred and sinful across centuries.

In 2016 I completed a doctoral thesis on a medieval tradition of writing called ‘The Sins of the Tongue’ (peccatum linguae). I focussed on a key idea in these texts: lying (mendacium) can cause psychological and physical ill health for both speaker and listener. This was the time of Brexit and the first Trump presidency. The idea resonated. I explored how the concept persisted from ancient sources well into the twenty-first century and exerted an untold influence on early medicine, theology, literature and many other aspects of culture. This was well beyond the remit of my thesis, so I began writing down instances of the relationship between lying and illness, broadly conceived, in another notebook. This second document came with me to the library each day. The work also prompted a sobering reflection on the omissions and dishonesties in my family, and the various kinds of disillusionment that might have stemmed from them. The seeds of this book began there – a shadow document representing the final year of my doctorate, when the boundaries between the professional and personal elements of my research seemed to dissolve.

The main way my mother and I communicated during that year was by text message, as we tried to reconcile our differing interpretations of the past and piece together a more graceful future. The relationship between the researcher and mother in the book thus acts as a filament among the historical material, illuminating and threading together different aspects of the tongue.

Ten years later, Tongue is an archive of an ambivalent organ, and a personal archive of my ambivalence in the face of difficult ethical questions: how do we respect another’s choices, when those choices impact us negatively? How do we discuss and heal from physical violence without reprising it? How do we accept the choices of women when they refuse to be ‘perfect victims’, recognising that their choices were, in truth, limited? The book does not answer these questions so much as bring them to the fore, accepting that multiple realities may be allowed to co-exist. 

The sources in the book are by no means exhaustive and many more books about the tongue could be written from other sociocultural and personal standpoints. For me, its form evolved naturally as a nodal essay with each cell connected, piecing together the long-lost flesh of the unspoken words between a mother and daughter. In this way, I hoped that the book could demonstrate the material nature of language – the physical realities that speech and silence can create – while remaining attentive to its slipperiness and suppleness. In so doing, I wanted the book to embody the tongue itself. 

Kathryn Crowcroft
9 July 2026

Andy Jackson reflects on Askew (October 2026), his first poetry collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Following his exploration of disability and deformity in Human Looking, the poems in Askew widen the lens, to feel their way into the impairments of our ecologies and our dialogues.

These poems arrived gradually out of a range of things I noticed and experienced over the last five years. The way people looked at you when you wore a face mask, especially when the Covid-19 pandemic first arrived. How the Goldfields, Dja Dja Wurrung country, where I live, can seem both devastated and strong. The sudden, unexpected death of a dear friend. How increasingly hard it seemed for people to listen to perspectives and griefs other than their own, especially online. The arrival in my body of various mysterious health issues. The bushfires that came within a few miles of our house.

At some point, it began to dawn on me that all these poems had fatigue in their bones. My fatigue, from the genetic condition I have, and the chronic illness I’ve been recently diagnosed with, is a fundamental constraint not only on my energy, but my creativity and being. 

Yet part of this exhaustion, this feeling not-quite-right, is also shared, is political and existential. None of us can entirely ignore the ongoing ecological crises, wars and conflicts, violences both intimate and global. This too feels chronic, an elegy unfurling into the future. No wonder writing often felt beyond my capacity. 

Yet, even before I was conscious of it, I sensed that constraint might hold some quiet, unexpected potential. Fatigue had me burrowing deep to find some well of rest and persistence, as well as burrowing outward to find community and a measure of groundedness.

I’m fortunate to have the benefit of an array of trusted collaborators, friends and colleagues, and a loving partner. In their creative essaying, I found rungs to climb, energies to be energised by. I wrote ekphrastically, in conversation and collaboration, and in response to poets whose writing embodies new ways of being masculine, of being human and sensitive. 

I also wrote many of these poems under formal constraint, using pre-existing poetic forms but also inventing new forms, such as the aftersongs, where the final word of each line is sourced from albums by musicians and composers who had died in the last five years. All these constraints dredged up movements and motifs I didn’t expect.

With all this in mind, many of these poems test out what it might mean to say ‘you’ or ‘we’ in a poem, instead of just ‘I’. The collection is also ordered so that each poem includes a word from the poem before it, a kind of ecological stitching.

That’s not to say Askew is entirely orderly. There are threads here that don’t obviously connect, that are frayed. The fabric, after all, is off-kilter. 

Andy Jackson
3 July 2026

Audition by Pip Adam has been shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2026. Part science fiction, part social realism, the book tells the story of three giants hurtling through space. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. Published by Giramondo in 2023, and released last year in the United States by Coffee House Press, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given. 

Write the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize judges, ‘As its three rom-com quoting central characters travel from incarceration to exile to a place beyond punishment, Audition explores carceral politics and the psychology of violence, and what healing from the harm of those systems might require in a world where embodiment and identity have lost all familiar forms.’

The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. This award is intended to recognise those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech—realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.

The winner of the 2026 prize will be announced on 21 October 2026. The 2024 winner was It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken (Giramondo, 2024), which also won The Novel Prize.

Set in a Sydney of recent times, and following on from The Magpie Wing and Paradise Estate, Max Easton’s third novel Now, Autonomy is about the ways history repeats itself, even if the lyrics don’t always rhyme.

Find here a playlist made by Easton, comprising some tracks he was listening to while writing the book, and others that feature in its pages.

Tracklist

1. Dead Moon – ‘Day After Day’
2. Sex Tourists – ‘Birthday Party’
3. Far Left Limit – ‘Paint it Black’
4. Negativland – ‘Christianity is Stupid’
5. Spite – ‘Pleasers’
6. DJ Smallcock – ‘Blue Murder’
7. Photogenic – ‘Work’
8. Вова Синий И Братья По – ‘…N (Ночь без тебя)’
9. Naked on the Vague – ‘Treading Water’
10. Dream Syndicate – ‘That’s What You Always Say’
11. Sardine v – ‘Sabotage’
12. Alternative TV – ‘Punk Life’
13. Good Throb – ‘The Queen Sucks Nazi Cock’
14. Tee Vee Repairman – ‘People (Everywhere I Go)’

Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan has won the Anne Elder Award 2025, an annual prize given to best first book of poetry published in Australia.

‘The winner and commended works stood out namely for their ambition, scope and inventiveness, commented the judges. ‘They break and bend rules, subvert and reimagine poetic expectations, experiment in syntax, lineation, narrative stakes and form, each one governed by a wholly singular poetic voice. These collections not only contribute to our national poetry but extend our poetic imagination in new and unexpected ways. They are nothing short of a triumph.’

Read the judges’ comments below.

Two Hundred Million Musketeers is an illustrious, spirited debut that beholds shifting inner worlds and geographies, polyphonic voices, and everyday lifeworlds. Drawing from the language of children, waged labour, history, Marxism, and travels from Melbourne to Türkiye, Başkan’s approach to poetry is playful, lively and experimental. Narratives and lifeworlds spill out with immense velocity. Poetic interrogations of speech and sound speak to traditions of migrant poets writing in English, like Ania Walwicz and Pi O. Başkan’s lines explode like fireworks – the collection holds the absurd rhythms, spontaneous expressions and joyous exclamations of the lived world. Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a radiant debut, outstanding in originality, experimentation and resonance.

The book was also shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Mary Gilmore Award and the ALS Gold Medal.

Read an excerpt here.

Read the opening story of Collected Short Fiction by Gerald Murnane, a volume published by Giramondo in 2018. In 2026, Murnane was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the General Division for distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, and to tertiary education.

One afternoon in one of the years when I used to stay at home to mind my son and my daughter and to do the housework while my wife was away at her job, my son was caught in a thunderstorm. The storm broke over my suburb at half past three, which is the time when schools are dismissed.

I had been alone in the house since half past eight that morning, when my children had left for school. All afternoon I had watched from my windows while the clouds gathered. I had thought of the storms that broke every few days in summer over the city where I had lived from my fifth year to my tenth year. That city was a hundred miles inland from the suburb of Melbourne where I lived with my wife and my two children. In the thirty-three years since I had left the inland city, whenever I had seen the sky darkening by day I had remembered the storms that gathered outside my schoolroom window in the 1940s.

The storms of those years had always arrived at mid-afternoon. When a storm was overhead the teacher would have to switch on the lights in the darkened schoolroom. Before the first lightning flashed, I moved as far away as I could move from the schoolroom windows. At home I used to hide from lightning by lying on the floor under my bed. At school I could only press my face against the desk-top and ask God not to let the lightning strike me through the windows. I never thought of lightning as striking a group of children. I saw in my mind the zig-zag of gold stabbing down from the black clouds and piercing the heart or the brain of the one child who had been marked out for dying on that afternoon.

When I thought of myself being killed by lightning, I dreaded the confusion this would cause. After I had failed to arrive home at the usual time, my father would search for me along the streets that I had promised I would follow every afternoon. (Before my first day at school I had promised I would never turn aside from McCrae Street, Baxter Street, and McIvor Road. On the very few afternoons when I left those streets and walked for a little way along the creek, I supposed as I walked that my father was hurrying along McIvor Road while I was down among the bulrushes. My father had set out from home to meet me, I supposed. He had come to tell me that our house had been burned down or that my mother had been killed, but we had passed one another without knowing. On those afternoons I had almost turned back from the creek to make sure that my father was not somewhere behind me and walking away from me. And even while I wondered whether I ought to turn back, I thought of my father’s arriving at the school and then turning back towards home but this time leaving the streets and walking along the creek for a little way because he thought I might have been loitering there whereas I was just then going back towards the school by way of the streets and passing my father again unseen.) When my father could not find me in my usual streets, he would think at first that I had turned aside to watch the water in the creek flowing swiftly after the storm. He would go down to the bank of the creek, and while he was looking for me among the bulrushes a priest from the presbytery next to my school would ride his bicycle along McCrae Street and Baxter Street and McIvor Road on his way to my father’s house to tell my father, who was not at home, that his only son had been killed by lightning.

I prayed that I would not be killed by the storm and that my father would not be lost and confused during the hour when the clouds had passed suddenly away to the east, and when the twilight that had seemed about to turn into darkness had turned instead into a bright afternoon with wet leaves flashing in the sun and steam rising from roofs. I prayed, and I was always spared, and I walked home while the gutters were flowing and the last of the black clouds were rumbling above the eastern horizon.

While the gutters flowed and the wet leaves flashed and the steam rose from iron roofs, I understood that I had been spared, but perhaps only for two or three days. The lightning that could have killed me was stabbing at the dark-green treetops far away past Axedale and Heathcote. By midnight the gold zig-zags would be shooting harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean. Days or even weeks later the clouds would settle quietly among the mountains of New Zealand or of South America. But somewhere behind me while I walked eastwards towards my home, another storm would soon arise.

Gerald Murnane has been appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, and to tertiary education.

‘This is an expression…of recognition from the only country I’ve ever known,’ Murnane, now 87, told the Australian. ‘I’m an extraordinarily lucky person. I’ve had, let’s say, 16 books published; I enjoy my life.’

Murnane is a writer of fiction, memoir, essays and poetry. His books, which have been published in many territories worldwide, include Tamarisk Row, The Plains, Inland, Barley Patch, A History of Books, A Million Windows, Border Districts, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, Green Shadows and Other Poems, and Last Letter to a Reader. He is a recipient of an Emeritus Fellowship from the Australia Council, the Patrick White Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Adelaide Festival Literature Award for Innovation, and various other awards. In 2018, the NYTimes published a feature story with the headline ‘Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?’

Last year, Giramondo Publisher Ivor Indyk was recognised on the King’s Birthday Honours List, awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his service to Australian literature.

Acclaimed Australian author Max Easton reflects on Now, Autonomy (1 Aug 2026), his third novel set in Sydney between the mid-nineties and now, following The Magpie Wing and Paradise Estate. The book expands Easton’s project, unique in Australian fiction, of documenting the dramatically changing modes of contemporary life through the lens of underground scenes and subcultures.

This novel has been built, demolished, reconstructed and sanded back so many times that in sitting down to write this author note, I can barely remember which version made it to print. It reminds me of a time when, after breaking a small bone in my wrist, a surgeon told me: ‘you can’t smash toffee, sticky tape it together and make it taste any good.’ But I would disagree. Anything tastes good if you want it bad enough, and I don’t think I’ve ever written anything with as much desire for finding toffee among the sellotape than I did with Now, Autonomy. 

I went through a lot of experiments to get to the heart of what I was looking for with this. I haggled with commercial real estate agents, released anonymously authored punk recordings made with friends, broke into condemned buildings to write among the asbestos fibres and pigeon shit. I’m not sure if that shows on the page, but it feels to me like the most embodied thing I’ve ever worked on. Its characters’ motivations, failures and vain attempts were often very close to my own or the people around me. Whether that’s fiction leading reality or the other way around is unclear to me, but maybe that was the point: to blur the boundaries between the page and the real world, without ever losing grip on the fact that this is still, very much, a novel.

I had two overarching passions that drove the writing of this book. One was the shape of Sydney, my home city that continuously suffers at the whims of developers, technocratic state planners and the interests of the investor class. The other was the shape of my generation, us millennials that bemoan the city and cultural milieu we’ve been handed without realising we’re not providing much more to those who come after us. There’s a cross-generational solidarity to Now, Autonomy, an ode to people who have tried and are trying to make good of a place like Sydney, especially for those who can’t meet the cost of living. It was an exercise in writing to the now from the depths of various archives, and in trying to provide something to a reader who sees little of interest in the glossy displays of the local book shop. 

On the note of this being the third book in a trilogy of Sydney novels: none of these need to be read in order, nor as a trio, but it’s interesting to me to see these stories and themes and characters sprawl across the novels and beyond, to journals, zines and guerilla publications for whoever eventually finds them. 

With thanks to all who worked on this book and whoever finds time to read it. 

Just two days after Lee Lai took home the Stella Prize, the author was declared a Best Young Australian Novelist for Cannon. As with the Stella, it was the first time in the award’s history that a graphic novel has been recognised.

Now in it’s thirtieth year, the prize – which is run by the Sydney Morning Herald – is given annually to Australian fiction writers aged 35 and under.

The judges described the work as ‘universal and quietly brilliant’, praising Lai’s ‘intimate story about the building pressures of family, work and relationships,’ where her ‘fine line drawings carry narrative, emotions and silence, perfectly complementing the spare text.’

In her interview with the paper, Lai says, ‘In Cannon, I wanted to write about the intensity, indispensability and dysfunctional intimacy of long-term queer friendships. Queers are so often looking to create family with one another, and succeeding and failing in beautiful and agonising ways (myself included). I’m hungry to see more stories that explore the queer platonic connections: the ones that are sometimes capable of breaking one’s heart even more profoundly.’

She adds: ‘I find it amusing when people tell me, “I’m just not sure how to read graphic novels”, and I want to tell them, “honey, it’s just top to bottom, left to right”. Best not to overthink it… Last year Michelle de Kretser, in reference to her experimental novel Theory and Practice said that “it’s good to expand the notion of what a novel can be”. I agree.’

Lee Lai will appearing with her fellow prize-winners at the Sydney Morning Festival.

Cannon by the acclaimed Australian cartoonist Lee Lai has been named the winner of the 2026 Stella Prize. The announcement was made on 13 May at a ceremony in Brisbane with the author in attendance. The win marks the first time that a graphic novel has received the top honour in the award’s history; Lai’s debut book, Stone Fruit, was shortlisted in 2022.

Worth $60,000, the Stella Prize is awarded annually to ‘the most excellent, original and outstanding book written by an Australian woman or non-binary writer’. 

Cannon was published in hardcover last year by Giramondo in Australia, and by Drawn & Quarterly in Canada, where the Melbourne-born author is based. It will also be published in French, German, Italian and Spanish. The book was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards, the GLAAD Media Awards and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and is currently in the running for a Doug Wright Award and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction – the North American equivalent to the Stella, celebrating ‘creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States.’

See the Stella judges’ report for Cannon below.

Reliable and dutiful Cannon (real name: Lucy; nickname Luce; ironically – or perhaps not – Luce Cannon) has myriad responsibilities. During the day, she helps her avoidant mother by taking care of her elderly gung-gung (maternal grandfather). At night, she works in the pressure-cooker kitchen of a fine dining restaurant. In her off-hours, she’s a confidante and troubleshooter for best friend Trish. However, Cannon is about to crack – something we see in a dizzying flashforward in the first pages. Cannon is a compelling depiction of a fracturing friendship between two queer, second-generation Chinese women. It is also a bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry, the profound toll it takes to be the “responsible one”, and what can happen when you are being taken advantage of repeatedly. (Bonus: it is also, somehow, very funny.) Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, shock and delight, and Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot. And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.

‘This year’s winner is a delight that goes right to the heart,’ Stella Prize Chair of Judges Sophie Gee further commented. ‘This year’s judges couldn’t resist the winning book’s combination of seriousness and playfulness. We loved how the writer tells the stories of many women’s lives, captured in a page-turning narrative that’s beautifully disciplined, emotionally rich and by turns disarmingly funny and alarmingly true to life.’

‘[Cannon] is a story about small-scale human follies, and the excruciating process of learning and growing through them,’ said Lee in her acceptance speech. ‘It’s also a book about love and about rage, and those are two emotions that have fuelled my efforts as an artist and as an organiser for the past many years. If I must think about the fact that this book is landing for somebody else, then my big hope is that it acts as a catharsis and an encouragement to experience some real love, or some real anger, and that one might use that for something worthwhile.’ 

Lai will commence a brief tour of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Public events include a conversation with Prize Judge Benjamin Law tonight, an event at RMIT in Melbourne on Monday, and a Queerstories and prize-winners panel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival next week. She toured the east coast of Australia earlier this year following previous book tours across Canada, the United States and Italy. View photos from the Sydney launch of Cannon on our Facebook, and hear a recording of the event here.

Giramondo has had a number of titles recognised by The Stella Prize since it began in 2013. Alexis Wright is distinguished as the only author to have won the prize twice, in 2018 for Tracker and in 2024 for Praiseworthy. Our other finalists include Sanya Rushdi for Hospital, Anwen Crawford for No Document, Yumna Kassab for The House of Youssef, Fiona Wright for The World Was Whole and the late Beverley Farmer for This Water: Five Tales. Several poetry titles have also been listed since the genre was included for consideration, including TAKE CARE and KONTRA by Eunice Andrada, and Naag Mountain by Manisha Anjali.

Publicity enquires relating to the Stella Prize can be directed to stacey@daydreamnation.co.

Following tours across Canada, the United States and Italy, acclaimed cartoonist Lee Lai flew to her home city of Melbourne as the first stop of her Australian coast tour of Cannon, her latest graphic novel. The Melbourne launch, on 11 March 2026 at the Crystal Palace & Courtyard, was co-presented with Liminal. Read a transcript of the event’s introduction by Liminal editor Leah Jing McIntosh here.

Hi, and welcome to the launch of Lee Lai’s Cannon. I’d like to begin by acknowledging that we meet tonight on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respect to elders past and present; this land was never ceded; it always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

I’m Leah Jing McIntosh, the editor of Liminal. Tonight, we have the immense privilege of a conversation between Lee Lai and Rachel Ang, two of the most talented comic artists working today. Lee will also do a multimedia reading afterwards! You can pick up a book from our friends at Amplify, Australian’s only bookstore dedicated to books by writers of colour. There will time for books signings and questions after their conversation.

But just before this, I have been asked to launch this book, and it is such a wild pleasure to do so, because I have known Lee for a long time; ten years ago, she was our very first interview subject for Liminal. So much has changed since; in author’s note, she writes about Cannon as a kind of ‘second-coming-of-age’, and it very much feels like I – and so many of us – have grown and become, both artistically and politically, alongside her work.

—

Lee’s second book opens in the aftermath of violence; we meet the eponymous Cannon standing in the middle of a restaurant, surrounded by smashed plates and broken chairs. It seems that Lee has upended Chekhov’s maxim: the Cannon has exploded before she has even really appeared.

We cut to three months prior, spend the next few hundred panels or so making sense of what has led to such an upheaval. Cannon is a chef who is entering what she calls the ‘uncool side of her twenties’, working in a Montreal kitchen. The book is slow accumulation of daily pressures and unmet desires. Most of Cannon’s relationships seem like endless exercises in grace and restraint. She works hard in the restaurant’s understaffed kitchen; she cares for a dying family member; she avoids the attentions of her asinine boss; and hangs out with her best friend Trish, whose feelings always seem to eclipse Cannon’s own.  

While reading, I was reminded often of what the poet Cathy Park Hong calls ‘Minor Feelings‘, which she describes as non-cathartic and enduring: feelings like shame, irritation, anxiety, melancholy. These feelings are not generated from major change, but from the lack of it. Hong notes that contemporary literature doesn’t often have a place for these feelings to land; one of the many things that are so special about Lee’s work, is in her ability to draw these kinds of feelings. Much of this comes down to the precision and visual economy of the page: there is such clarity to her lines, and her characteristic compositional restraint, that allows the book to bear the weight of these unresolved feelings – that Hong is talking about. And, as you read, they only grow heavier – through the book’s growing hesitations, deferred conversations and subtle adjustments in posture or expression or distance between characters. (A critic for the New York Times writes in his glowing review of Cannon that the book’s real antagonist is not a character but instead inertia.)

I think this is so affecting – the inertia, or the irresolution, for the most part – because Lee is incredibly good at paying attention to, and drawing the everyday: hands crushing garlic, cracking an egg, or snapping a Tupperware lid shut. We feel the swampy heat of summer, watch as a bead of sweat slowing drips down a face, spot the vegetables peeking out of the top of a tote bag. Her drawings take such pleasure in the textures of daily life, which is precisely where this complex knot of feelings tends to reside. But there is still very much space to breathe. In her author’s note, Lee writes that this book was an exploration of rage, but too of silliness. Which I love, and which feels so true. It is such a mark of talent that she manages both affective registers with great ease. We care about these characters because they are so very imperfect. It is in the silly absurdities that I think she makes the very most of the comics form, so I will leave you to find these moments for yourself.

Just a final note; Lee’s Stone Fruit was previously longlisted for the Stella prize; tonight, across town, it has just been announced that she has been longlisted once more for Cannon (!!) So, with that, please join me in celebrating and launching this brilliant work.