Two Penguin authors make the shortlist for the 2025 Stella Prize

We’re thrilled to share that two Penguin Random House Australia books have been shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize.

Cactus Pear For My Beloved by Samah Sabawi and Translations by Jumaana Abdu have both received this incredible honour.

Since 2012, the Stella Prize has celebrated women’s writing, by honouring the best work of fiction or non-fiction by an Australian woman published in the previous calendar year. ‘Our purpose is to promote books by Australian women writers in all their diversity, support greater participation in the world of literature, and create a more equitable and vibrant national culture,’ says the organisation. The winner receives $60,000 and the prestige of being recognised as a Stella Prize winner.

About the shortlisted books

Cactus Pear For My Beloved by Samah Sabawi

The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland.

Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands.

Filled with love for land, history, peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.

One of the gifts of Samah Sabawi's Baba is to remain open-hearted and optimistic.

Translations by Jumaana Abdu

Amid a series of personal disasters, Aliyah and her daughter, Sakina, retreat to rural New South Wales to make a new life. Aliyah manages to secure a run-down property and hires a farmhand, Shep, an extremely private Palestinian man and the region’s imām.

During a storm, she drives past the town’s river and happens upon a childhood friend, Hana, who has been living a life of desperation. Aliyah takes her in and tries to navigate the indefinable relationships between both Hana and her farmhand. Tensions rise as Aliyah’s growing bond with Shep strains her devotion to Hana.

Finally, all are thrown together for a reckoning alongside Hana’s brother, Hashim, and Aliyah’s confidante, Billie – a local Kamilaroi midwife she met working at the hospital – while bushfires rage around them.

About the authors

Samah Sabawi

Samah Sabawi is an author, playwright and poet and a recipient of multiple awards both nationally and internationally. Her theatre credits include the critically acclaimed and award-winning plays Tales of a City by the Sea and THEM. In 2020 Samah received the prestigious Green Room Award for Best Writing in the independent theatre category, and was shortlisted for both the NSW and Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. With Stephen Orlo Samah edited the anthology Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas, winner of the Patrick O’Neill Award and she co-authored I Remember My Name: Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso, edited by Vacy Vlazna, winner of the Palestine Book Award. Samah received a Doctor of Philosophy from Victoria University for her thesis titled Inheriting Exile, transgenerational trauma and the Palestinian Australian Identity.

Jumaana Abdu

Jumaana Abdu is a Dal Stivens Award winner and an alumnus of the Wheeler Centre Next Chapter program. Her work features in Thyme Travellers (Roseway Publishing), an international anthology of Palestinian speculative fiction. She has been published elsewhere in Kill Your Darlings, Westerly, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Liminal, Overland, Debris and New Australian Fiction 2024. During the day, she is a medical doctor.