investigating power, privilege and inequality

Michelle de Kretser has won the fiction prize in the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. It’s her second major prize this year for her ambitious, experimental novel Theory and Practice, which won the 2025 Stella Prize (and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin).

De Kretser headed a winners’ list that confronts moments of crisis and care. The six books – across fiction, nonfiction, Australian history, poetry, young adult literature and children’s literature – reckon with histories of illness and inequality. They consider what it means to live according to one’s principles.

The other winners are Rick Morton’s coruscating investigation into the Robodebt scandal Mean Streak (nonfiction), Geraldine Fela’s Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis (Australian history), David Brooks The Other Side of Daylight (poetry), Peter Carnavas’ illustrated space novel Leo and Ralph (children’s literature) and Krystal Sutherland’s The Invocations (young adult literature).

These books shed fresh light on the way our institutions, social relations and personal imaginations are shaped – and how they might be remade. Taken together, they map the pressures and possibilities of contemporary Australian life.

Each winner receives A$80,000, with the shortlisted writers receiving $5,000 each – all tax-free.

Mean Streak

Rick Morton’s Mean Streak (Fourth Estate) investigates how institutional power causes personal suffering. He details how, over four painful years, a federal government scheme to recover fake welfare debts spiralled into one of Australia’s most significant public policy failures, resulting in physical suffering, financial ruination – and in some cases, death. Linking the personal and the political, Morton dissects the bureaucratic, obfuscatory language that masked the scheme’s illegality. The task he sets himself is to understand how structural injustice is felt in the body. He conveys how such external pressures are rendered visible in moments of distress, despair and resistance. The judges commended Mean Streak as an “excellent example of the fusion of thorough journalistic methods with an empathetic understanding of the humans at the heart of the story”. They were especially taken with Morton’s “single-minded determination” to turn a government’s wrongdoing into a profound, enthralling account of “what happens when we lose our collective conscience”. Theory and Practice “I succeeded in doing what I set out to do, which is to write a novel that doesn’t read like a novel; that reads like fact, like life captured on the wing,” said Michelle de Kretser earlier this year. Moving between fictional, autofictional and essayistic modes, Theory and Practice (Text Publishing) is, as the judges note, “elegant, playful and razor sharp”.