Kimberley Starr is a Melbourne writer and teacher, the author of The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies (UQP), winner of the Queensland Premier’s Award for Best Manuscript, selected for One Book One Brisbane; The Book of Whispers, winner of The Text Prize; Torched (Pantera Press), shortlisted for the Davitt Award for Best Crime Novel; and most recently, The Map of Night (Pantera Press). She has also written for The Griffith Review and The Age. Kimberley recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing at La Trobe University and teaches English at St Monica’s College. Her current manuscript, being made of stone, tells the story of an Australian artist in Florence and asks what remains when memory and language begin to fail.
Kimberley's manuscript being made of stone has been shortlisted for the 2026 Dorothy Hewett Award. In this short interview, with Mabel Gibson, Kimberley Starr shares how it feels to be shortlisted and their advice for writers looking to submit to the Dorothy Hewett Award in the future.
About being made of stone: In being made of stone, Chloe is an older artist in Florence. She is challenged by a slipping memory and by her daughter, Poppy, back in Australia, who wants her to be safe at home. While Chloe moves around, statues feel like her companions and mirrors are like witnesses; art is the main language she has left, while she struggles to hold on to her freedom. The novel interrogates what remains of a person when language and memory fail. Can art be a truer language than speech? Are mothers and daughters always looking for each other, and the selves they used to be?
Mabel Gibson interviewed Kimberley about her shortlisting:
How do you feel being shortlisted for the 2026 DHA?
I’m honoured to be shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award. Hewett’s work examined the lives of Australian women with courage and clarity, and it means a great deal to have being made of stone considered for an award that carries her name.
How long have you been working on being made of stone and what made you submit to the DHA this year?
This manuscript has taken quite a while to create, and over the past few years I’ve produced several very different drafts. There have also been months where it has been filed in a bottom drawer. But I couldn’t leave it alone and kept pulling it out to work on some more. I thought the DHA might be a good fit because of Dorothy Hewett herself; the UWAP website describes her as having “challenged the norms of twentieth-century Australian culture”. Being made of stone is also interested in resistance: Chloe challenges assumptions made about her memory and competence, and the manuscript is more experimental with structure and interiority than anything I have written before.
Being made of stone explores the fragility of memory and what remains of a person when memory fails. Why did you want to explore that in this work?
As a story teller, the narratives that we all tell ourselves to make sense of our lives are really interesting to me. I wanted to explore how Chloe creates and recreates her identity while her memory fractures. I also wanted to explore the way she fights against assumptions that are made about her: people think her confusion makes her helpless, but Chloe insists on her continuing self as an artist and traveller, even when people who believe they have her best interests at heart try to take these things from her. Chloe forgets practical details but she continues to tell stories about her life that make it make sense to her. The statues helped me explore these ideas because Chloe imbues them with imagined life. The statues continue to exist and to mean something even when damaged. Her struggles are deeply personal to me as well in my role of carer for a family member with memory loss (that is their story, not mine to tell) and my own experience with transient aphasia (the loss of access to a vocabulary that I suffer from with migraines).
Do you have any advice for writers who have been working on a manuscript and are considering submitting their work into the DHA in the future?
I’d say don’t give up on a manuscript just because it has taken a long time, or because it has gone through several drafts. Some ideas need to be put away and returned to, before you get to the point where you feel like you have done enough with your ideas to show them to other people. The process of preparing a manuscript for the competition is useful itself, because it forces you to step back from your own work and ask yourself what other people might see in it. And then you might also get the lovely surprise of a shortlisting! For anyone thinking about submitting to the DHA, I’d say, once you think your work is ready to be shared with people who care about new writing, then be brave and send it.
Check out our interviews with the other 5 shortlisted writers: