‘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.)’

‘Last time I was here I filled in a form, or maybe I filled it out. I hate forms. After last time, I formed an opinion. I cannot articulate the opinion, but I know I formed one. On a scale of one to ten, I can never just pick one number. On a scale of one to then. The doctor is looking at my form. I nod and smile when she says something I don’t hear.’

‘A beautiful, hurt mouth. Close to midnight. At the same time, one cannot feel another person’s pain, but only infer it from their behaviour and their reports of it. The background was in the backyard but I’ve always struggled with beginnings. The man I was talking to was small and far away. Coincidence is stitched into goals. A few frames later, wheels fall off to create drama.’

‘I wanted to rediscover this portrait of a woman who has the look of someone looking, not being looked at. Over six years I wrote the title poem ‘Mirror Landscape’. The poem works across a gap, like that gap between a mirror and its landscape. On one side of it is history. On the other, invention; and each side can be read without the other.’

‘At midday a gong sounds, the sea / turns on its side and I see my cloud / coming from a long way off to feed me— / stately and vague, slipping easily across the mirror- / like distance dividing there from here’

‘I did not want to write about a journey of my particular specific illness, rather I wanted to explore the social aspect of illness in relation to identity and family, and I wanted to use illness as a concept, to illustrate the struggle for autonomy and a sense of self, tying it in with a relationship where the daughter struggles to separate herself from her mother.’

‘At the time of writing, I was very interested in the idea that disease is both self-created and self-cured. My own experience with chronic illness led me to holistic approaches that highlighted the link between the mind and body. My mother had a copy of You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, and this book became an important part of how I related to my illness, as well as being an influence on my writing.’

KONTRA by poet Eunice Andrada and Cannon by graphic novelist Lee Lai are finalists for the 2026 Stella Prize.

‘I wrote the poems of KONTRA to imagine a Filipino woman who doesn’t die; someone who is free to live in her queerness and her everyday acts of resistance. Someone who can move towards a future of her own making.’

‘And they shadow her. They gather around her, this elusive figure, don’t she move quick? The six of them scale her. They move in unison. Do you know about that? About moving as a unit? It’s harmonious. Here come the six, they used to say, the six mix, here they are: the six fix, six peas in a pod, the six horsemen, the six kings-men, the neighbours would say. Here they come.’

‘Each line is visually palpable and thematically resonant, cutting fertile ground for mutual possibilities of desire and resistance. At once tender and defiant, KONTRA  is a testament to lyrical mastery.’ 

Giramondo is proud to be a participating publisher in the Open Book: Australian Publishing Internship in 2026. Applications are now open, and close on 23 March.

At the time of his passing Lionel Fogarty was working on his latest collection, Warrior with a Fighting Stick. He was that warrior, and in his poetry and painting, language was his fighting stick.

Osdany Morales’ Security Questions, translated from the Spanish by Harry Bauld, uses the security questions that Morales was asked on his arrival in the US as way into his experiences as an immigrant. 

‘Ruins, Child, then, is a work gathered/rooted in landscape – the salt marsh of the Hutchinson River. That is to say, I write first toward stillness. Always public and domestic spaces, collective movement, and a granular examination of proximity and discomfort.’

Giramondo is delighted to be publishing three novels by the acclaimed Danish novelist Helle Helle, ‘one of Scandinavia’s finest authors’ (Dagbladet).