The Stella Prize Chief Judge, author and academic Brenda Walker, has summed up the shortlist for the 2016 shortlist as “finely composed and compassionate literary investigations of the fate of individuals interacting with the natural world and with social authority; with protection and self-protection in complicated environments; with the hard-won joy of living”. They are:
- Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett Daylight (Random House)
- Hope Farm by Peggy Frew (Scribe)
- A Few Days in the Country by Elizabeth Harrower, pictured centre, (Text)
- The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau (Bloomsbury)
- The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood, pictured right, (Allen & Unwin)
- Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger by Fiona Wright, pictured left, (Giramondo).