‘Real shock’ as local author longlisted for $60,000 Stella Prize
Natalie Harkin’s latest book exposes the exploited domestic labour of First Nations women. The “powerful reckoning” has just been longlisted for one of the country’s most prestigious literary prizes.
Narrunga poet Natalie Harkin says being longlisted for the $60,000 Stella Prize was “completely out of left field and a real shock”.
Last night the author, artist and Flinders University academic’s latest book, Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea, was named as one of twelve finalists for the prize, awarded annually to new work by Australian women and non-binary writers across all genres.
Published last year by Wakefield Press, Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea explores South Australia’s decades-long history of Aboriginal women being compelled into domestic servitude. It’s the latest instalment in Harkin’s ongoing practice of ‘archival-poetics’ which has seen her present work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Samstag Museum of Art, and the Art Gallery of South Australia – often as part of the Unbound Collective.
This year’s Stella Prize was judged by a panel including Sophie Gee, Jaclyn Crupi, Benjamin Law, Gillian O’Shaughnessy and Ellen van Neerven. Selected from 212 entries, the panel called Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea a “powerful reckoning with the state archives that illuminates and vividly remembers the harrowing experiences of Aboriginal women and girls in domestic servitude in South Australia”.
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“The intergenerational effects on families and communities are deeply conveyed, and Harkin’s woven truth-telling is a potent response to whitewashed narratives and brutal systems of control and capture. No longer invisible or ignored, the labour histories of Aboriginal women are important in the greater context of a nation still denying its past.”
Harkin says the recognition highlighted the powerful testimony of the women whose stories feature in the book.
“I think most importantly, Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea was a collaborative project with Aboriginal women in my family and community to document their domestic labour memory stories, in the ways they wanted, with their voices, as well as the voices of Aboriginal women captured in the archives – and these collective voices represent the heartbeat of the book,” Harkin said in a statement shared with InReview.
“I think for me the honour of being long-listed is for the Aboriginal women – and to keep these hidden domestic service histories on the public radar, especially the unfinished business of stolen wages and archival justice, because there’s still so much work to do in this space, especially in South Australia.”
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The longlist also includes The Rot, the latest poetry collection from Goorie and Koori poet and Overland journal editor Evelyn Araluen. Araluen recently took home the top prize at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, in which Araluen said she was inspired to finish the collection after being heckled at Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Michaela Sahhar, who visited Adelaide last week as part of the Constellations: Not Writers’ Week festival, was also recognised her family memoir Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family. The list also includes Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks, Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, Cannon by Lee Lai and Fireweather by Miranda Darling.
Harkin’s earlier collection Archival-Poetics won the John Bray Poetry Award at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in 2020, while last year InReview critic Heather Taylor Johnson called Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea a “significant book, equally beautiful and brutal”.
Michelle de Kretser took home the 2025 Stella Prize for her novel Theory & Practice.
The winner of the 2026 Stella Prize will be announced on May 13
2026 Stella Prize longlist
KONTRA by Eunice Andrada
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks
Ankami by Debra Dank
Fireweather by Miranda Darling
Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea by Natalie Harkin
Cannon by Lee Lai
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
Wait Here by Lucy Nelson
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family by Micaela Sahhar
58 Facets: On violence and the law by Marika Sosnowski
I Am Nannertgarrook by Tasma Walton
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