Santilla Chingaipe’s book Black Convicts is on the Stella Awards 2025 longlist announced in Adelaide, Australia on Tuesday, March 4, 2025.
The Stella Prize is a major annual literary award celebrating Australian women and non-binary writers for an outstanding book of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. The award, worth $60,000, was established by 11 Australian women writers, editors, publishers and booksellers who became concerned about the poor representation of books by women in Australia’s top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, in 2013.
The 2025 jury is chaired by Astrid Edwards alongside Debra Dank, Leah Jing McIntosh, Rick Morton, and Yassmin Abdel-Magied. They announced the longlist for the award on Tuesday, March 4.
Jury chair Astrid Edwards said, “Literary prizes are subjective beasts, but I assure you, the works on this year’s longlist are remarkable.”
The longlist announced includes Black Convicts by Zambian-born filmmaker, historian and author, Santilla Chingaipe. Chingaipe’s, who is based in Melbourne, has work that explores settler colonialism, slavery, and contemporary migration in Australia. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Guardian, The BBC, and she is a cultural critic for The Monthly and is the founder of Behind The Screens, an annual program supported by VicScreen, aimed at increasing the representation of people historically excluded from the Australian film industry.
Black Convicts is a non-fiction title detailing the untold stories of Black African convicts, will be published in 2024. It has the following blurb;
On the First Fleet of 1788, at least 15 convicts were of African descent. By 1840 the number had risen to almost 500. Among them were David Stuurman, a revered South African chief transported for anti-colonial insurrection; John Caesar, who became Australia’s first bushranger; Billy Blue, the stylishly dressed ferryman who gave his name to Sydney’s Blues Point; and William Cuffay, a prominent London Chartist who led the development of Australia’s labour movement. Two of the youngest were cousins from Mauritius—girls aged just 9 and 12—sentenced over a failed attempt to poison their mistress.
But although some of these lives were documented and their likenesses hang in places like the National Portrait Gallery, even their descendants are often unaware of their existence.
By uncovering lives whitewashed out of our history, in stories spanning Africa, the Americas and Europe, Black Convicts also traces Australia’s hidden links to slavery, which both powered the British Empire and inspired the convict system itself. Situating European settlement in its global context, Chingaipe shows that the injustice of dispossession was driven by the engine of labour exploitation. Black Convicts will change the way we think about who we are.
The shortlist will be revealed on April 8 before the winner is announced on May 23, 2025.
Leave a Reply