The Stella Prize, a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing, recently announced the twelve titles on the longlist for the 2025 prize, which includes the nonfiction book Black Convicts by Zambian-born Australian journalist Santilla Chingaipe.

Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia works to remedy the erasure of African prisoners from the history of Australian settlement. The book traces Australia’s hidden links to slavery, which both powered the British Empire and inspired the convict system itself, powerfully forcing a confrontation with how Australia sees itself in relation to the global histories of labor exploitation. Published by Scribner Australia, this is Chingaipe’s first book.

The 2025 Stella Prize judges praised the important intervention of the book:

Santilla Chingaipe’s Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia is that rarest of works – a book that changes how the reader understands history as they read…Black Convicts represents a substantial intervention in our understanding of the convict archive and offers a new understanding of Australia’s participation in slavery since colonisation.

This is the 13th year of the Stella Prize, which is annually awarded to the “most excellent, original and outstanding book” written by an Australian woman or non-binary writer.

Each of the longlisted authors receives $1000 in prize money thanks to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. The shortlist will be announced on April 8 and the winner of the $60,000 prize on May 23.

Congratulations & best of luck to Chingaipe!