Michelle de Kretser:
“I ask you—I beg you—to join us in speaking out for Palestine.”

On May 23rd, during this year’s Sydney Writers Festival, Sri-Lankan-born Australian writer Michelle de Kretser was awarded the 2025 Stella Prize for her critically-acclaimed seventh novel, Theory & Practice.

One of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards, the $60,000 Stella prize is given each year to “the most excellent, original and outstanding book written by an Australian woman or non-binary writer.”

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Hello everyone.

Thank you all so much for being here. The 2025 Stella Prize does my work great honour, and I’m so happy to accept it.

I wish I could join you in person to celebrate all the long and shortlisted writers. As that’s not possible, I’m recording this on land stolen from the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. I pay my respects to Gadigal elders past and present, and acknowledge that their connection to country is unbroken. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

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Recently, two groups of women have been on my mind. In the first group are Jo Case, Sophie Cunningham, Monica Dux, Christine Gordon, Foong Ling Kong, Rebecca Starford, Louise Swinn and Aviva Tuffield: the founders of the Stella Prize. My respect and gratitude to those eight women, who rejected business as usual, 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.

Even if I knew the names of everyone in the second group, there wouldn’t be time to read them out, for they’re the women and girls of Gaza. They’re the women and girls murdered, maimed, starved, raped, tortured, terrorised, orphaned, bereaved, incarcerated, dehumanised, displaced, in business as usual for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing—war crimes for which Australia provides material and diplomatic support.

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 precious rights eroded and authoritarian laws rushed in on the flimsiest of pretexts. We’ve seen our institutions and our media betray the principles they’re supposed to uphold. 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.

A crucial aim of this program of suppression is to intimidate. 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.

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. Career own goal, warned the voice.

Many of you will be familiar with that voice, and its seductive message of acquiescence and self-preservation. It urged me to offer you an uplifting narrative about female solidarity—I could tell you about some of the fantastic women who’ve inspired and supported me. Or I could speak to you about the creativity of Australian women, and add a little marketing plug for myself and my fellow writers, asking you to support us by buying our books.

Unlike the women and girls of Gaza, I’m not brave. Fear is a formidable and insidious opponent. It convinces us to censor ourselves, to obey in advance, to down the Kool-Aid before it’s been offered. 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.

And I remembered all of you. You’re here because you share Stella’s glorious vision of a more just and equitable world—that other world that is possible.

I’ve always believed that the wish to help others is a hard-wired human instinct, and so I ask you—I beg you—to join us in speaking out for Palestine. Help us fight the lie that equates our peaceful opposition to genocide with sympathy for terrorism. Help us fight the lie that equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Help us fight the lie that Palestinian lives don’t matter. Help us fight the undermining of democracy. Help us to fight fear.

Literature, philosophy and religion all ask a question that each of us is called upon to answer: How shall I live? How shall you and I live? As humans, acting from conscience? Or as bots, dead inside?

In her essay about Gaza, “Learning To See In The Dark,” Ali Martin, the Australian human rights lawyer, writes of the need to translate compassion and outrage into resistance and change. Citing Martin Luther King Jnr, she reminds us of actions, great and small, that bend the arc of history towards justice.

We have two weapons that the powerful dread: words and the truth. That’s why truthful speech is being closed down, and why it’s essential to resist silence.

The Gazan poet Plestia Alaqad has written about the “outpouring of love and solidarity” that she found in Australia. She goes on: “This generosity of spirit […] is a reminder that despite the challenges we face, there are many who are willing to walk alongside us.” I draw courage from her words, and from the mighty rejection of business as usual embodied in the Stella Prize. And I dare to hope that against the odds, working together, speaking out together, in Australia we may yet bend the arc of history towards justice.

Thank you for listening and have a great evening.

Always was, always will be. And free Palestine.