Comparing Apples With Antelopes
Is creative non fiction the ‘poor cousin’ of the Australian literary community? Memoirist and essayist Sian Prior argues the case for a re-evaluation of this writing style.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m listening to a discussion about two new novels on The Bookshelf on Radio National. The presenter and her guests are respectful and incisive as they discuss the writers’ craft - plot, voice, characters, themes, structure, experimentation – all the complexities and pleasures of creating fictional worlds. And I’m asking myself, when was the last time I heard the art of creative non fiction being discussed in such attentive detail?
As a writer of memoirs and essays, I have a personal investment in this question. And as a former Radio National presenter, I’m also aware that non fiction books are usually considered to be outside the remit of RN’s arts programs. Instead, non fiction works are usually discussed on RN’s current affairs, specialist and in depth conversation shows, which focus on either the informative content of their books or the personal lives of the creators. Elements of literary craft are rarely discussed.
I’ve also been a judge of several major awards for non fiction, and a host of, and guest on, numerous writers festival panels. As a writers’ festival guest, I have always been invited onto panels with other non fiction writers, and never with novelists. A Berlin Wall has been constructed between these literary genres, with festival programmers often ignoring the fact that we speak a common language – the language of creative writing. (When my latest book came out - an unconventionally-structured, deeply personal memoir about childlessness - I was invited onto a festival panel with the authors of two journalistic books about motherhood. Fantastic books, fantastic authors, but we had little in common.)
As a judge of non fiction awards, I have listened as my fellow judges weighed up the merits of competing titles based on the quantity and quality of academic or journalistic research done by the authors. The creative elements of some non fiction books – innovative use of voice, shifting temporal vantage points, experimentation, imagination, lyricism, poetics – have at times been cited as reasons for them NOT to be considered for the prize. Exquisitely written (and well-researched) non fiction books have been dismissed because their authors included self-reflective autobiographical material.
I have tried in these forums to argue for the ‘research value’ of lived experience, and for the excellent literary craft employed in these books, with limited success. Comparing a 500-page historical tome written by a tenured academic with a 200-page lyrical and experimental memoir sometimes feels like comparing apples with antelopes. There is a perception that only the historians, or journalists, or social scientists, have done the ‘hard work’ that deserves an award.
As both a university lecturer and a freelance journalist, I would never dismiss the value of traditional academic or journalistic research. But there is another form of research – autoethnography - a self-interrogatory style of analysis that requires deep reflection on the life of the author, and an understanding of how form can work with content in creative non fiction to generate universal insights. But some still consider autoethnography to be a kind of intellectual solipsism, and memoirs and personal essays to be exercises in self-indulgent navel-gazing.
When the Stella Prize was initiated in 2012, I was optimistic. In recent decades, many boundary-pushing developments in creative non fiction have been led by female and non binary writers. Surely this style of writing would get more of a look-in now? Admittedly the competition was stiffer, given the Stella Prize is open to fiction and poetry, as well as non fiction. But only four out of thirteen Stella awards have this far been given to authors of non fiction books, and only two of those four could be classified as creative non fiction.
I had another moment of hope in 2022 when French writer Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her multiple memoirs, a rare exception for a prize that has usually gone to novelists. The few winning non fiction authors have mostly been historians, political commentators or philosophers.
There have been other positive developments in the last decade. In the early 2010s, the Victorian Premiers’ Literary Award for non fiction went to historians four years in a row, but over the last decade more creative non fiction work have crept into the shortlists (perhaps I’m not the only past judge who offered the organisers feedback about this issue).
When the 2025 WA Premiers Literary Awards were announced, the non fiction winner – and all the shortlisted books – were memoirs, or hybrid memoirs. Several of the shortlisted authors in the 2025 NSW Premier’s Award for Non Fiction employed elements of creative non fiction in their works.
Last year the decision by Melbourne University to shut down Meanjin felt like another step backwards for the creative non fiction genre. This literary journal has long been a welcoming haven for essayists and memoirists hoping to find readerships for their work (my first memoir ‘Shy’ began life as a personal essay in Meanjin). Thankfully QUT has stepped into the breach and become the new custodian of this precious publication, hopefully continuing its legacy of curating and distributing creative non fiction writing.
Is it partly a problem of too few prizes for too broad a category? While all non fiction works are usually lumped together, most other genres have their sub-genre prizes. In the fiction category, there are dozens of short story awards. There are also awards for romance novelists (the Romantic Book of the Year, the Emerald Award, the ARR Awards), fantasy and science fiction writers (Aurealis awards, Ditmar Awards), crime writers (the Ned Kelly Awards, the Louie Award, the Allen and Unwin Crime Fiction Award), and female crime and mystery writers (the Scarlett Stiletto Awards), as well as the major state-based awards that have traditionally gone to so-called ‘literary’ novels.
Even within the wider non fiction category there are specific prizes for journalistic works (the Walkley Awards), history books (the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History), and war history books (the Les Carlyon Prize). There are also some awards for ‘life writing’ (the National Biography Award, the Magarey Medal, the Nita Kibble Award), but these are not necessarily written in a creative non fiction style.
By contrast, there are just a few opportunities for the writers of creative non fiction to be specifically rewarded for their craft. The ABR (Australian Book Review) Calibre Prize essay and the KYD (Kill Your Darlings) Creative Non Fiction Prize are amongst the rare exceptions, and they are mostly for short form works.
What are the impacts on Australian creative non fiction writers of this paucity of opportunities for rewards and publicity? If your artform is largely ignored by the nation’s preeminent cultural broadcaster, it can be hard to generate or find readerships. If you are competing on a playing field in which your opponents are considered more deserving of a win than you, no matter how well you play, the game could seem rigged.
Should we creative non fiction writers switch to writing fiction? Many novelists use their own lives as material for their stories. We could do that too, but what might we be risking in the process? In this age of artificial intelligence, floods of fakery and shameless fictional propaganda, surely true stories have more value now, not less? Surely there will be a growing human hunger for authenticity, for honesty, for nuanced approaches to hard truths and universal insights? If we lose the capacity to feel and to feed that hunger, what else might be lost?