Author
Frank Moorhouse was disqualified from consideration for his novel
Grand Days because the story was set in Europe during the 1920s and was not sufficiently Australian. 1995 winner
Helen Darville, also known as Helen Demidenko and Helen Dale, won for
The Hand That Signed the Paper and sparked a debate about authenticity in Australian literature. Darville claimed to be of Ukrainian descent and said it was fiction based on family history. Writer
David Marr, who presented the award to her, said that revelations about her true background did not "alter a single thing about the quality of the story, it knocks completely out of the water her answers to critics who said it was not historically accurate, that she knows because of direct family experience, which appears to be complete bull----." Even before the hoax was revealed, Darville’s book was considered anti-Semitic and justified the genocide of Jewish people. It was also later revealed that she plagiarised from multiple sources. In 2004, three judges resigned due to what they viewed as the commodification of the awards. 2022 longlisted writer
John Hughes was accused of plagiarising significant sections of his 2021 book
The Dogs from Nobel Laureate
Svetlana Alexievich's nonfiction book
The Unwomanly Face of War. Nearly 60 similarities and identical sentences were found in a comparison of Hughes' novel and the English version of Alexievich's book.
The Guardian newspaper also found similarities between incidents described in the books, including the central scene from which
The Dogs takes its title. Further investigation found other examples of plagiarism in the novel and that Hughes copied sections of classic texts including
The Great Gatsby and
Anna Karenina without acknowledging the original source. The book was subsequently withdrawn from competition. The
Stella Prize was created in 2013 as a reaction to the supposed under-representation of women as winners of literary prizes, in particular the 2011 Miles Franklin Award shortlist. However, since 2013, only three men have won the Miles Franklin Award. == Repeat winners ==