The Wandering was longlisted for the Stella Prize 2021

March 4, 2021

Since it was first awarded in 2013, the Stella Prize has become an influential and much-loved feature of the Australian literary calendar, significantly boosting sales and raising the profile of individual women and women’s writing in this country. This year, we’re thrilled to welcome a further twelve masterful books to the ever- expanding ‘Stella bookshelf’.

This year’s longlist explores aspects of human nature and the natural world, as well as our place within the natural world. They make space for: untold histories and stories; systemic flaws within the Australian justice system; tales of retribution, grief and loss, self-expression and interrogation; Yuwaalaraay language and culture, experiences unique to women and queer women; the concept of ‘borders,’ both real and imagined; as well as the role of family, community and inheritance.

Stella’s judges — Zoya Patel (Chair), Jane Harrison, Elizabeth McCarthy, Ian See and Tamara Zimet — have selected twelve outstanding books for the 2021 Stella Prize longlist.

Judges report for The Wandering:

In an ingenious meeting of form and function, The Wandering uses the classic structure of a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ story to interrogate notions of travel, social inequality, free will, and how we build our lives. Beginning with a deal with the Devil – who offers the narrator a pair of red shoes that will allow her to fulfil a long-held desire to travel – the narrative transports the reader around the world: from Jakarta to Amsterdam to Tijuana. The novel evokes these settings with colour and life, but also reveals the sinister undercurrents of a cosmopolitan society.

Woven into the narrative are reinterpretations of folk tales and other stories, making the journey – or, indeed, journeys – through the novel a rich, dizzying experience. While The Wandering is unabashedly polemical at times, it always remains engaging and exhilarating, and Intan Paramaditha is to be applauded for realising the soaring ambition of this work.