I was in no way prepared for pregnancy – had not even considered the idea that pregnancy is something to prepare for. I had not thought about what Maggie Nelson labels ‘the capaciousness of pregnancy. The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before ... the rearrangement of internal organs, the upward squeezing of the lungs.’ I imagined such things almost painlessly. After all, my mother had done it; my grandmothers had done it. How hard could it be?

On Thursday, I moved through my busy day at a remove. Being occupied was best. At every other moment of my day, I felt two things racing through my body. Fear and anger.

At this conference the plenary speaker was cloaked in impressive accolades: a Professor from the UK, a translator of and collaborator with a renowned French theorist, and the author of sixteen books. Most of his work looks at cultural fields, the ways these are created, and the dynamics within them. It looked like it would be an interesting talk. It wasn’t.

I read Carol Shields’ last novel, Unless, in the summer of 2003, a book that examines, through the fictional life of author Reta Winters, the ‘callous lack of curiosity about great women’s minds’, and the differences in how our culture values books by women and men. Unless helped me realise that all my years of reading books – so-called great books – by male writers had left me fairly clueless about women’s lives. Through my literary education, I had come to embrace a world in which I, as a woman, saw myself as marginal, ephemeral, vague.

Yet in Wood’s novel we get the feeling that her dystopian future is not so far away, that the brutality that is levelled at the women in the book is right around the corner. So when I finished reading Wood’s novel, I was relieved and grateful that it had won The Stella. And I wondered if a book like this would have won a prestigious national prize in Australia before Stella was established.

Think of how different our literary world would look if we read everything blind. You would never have to read a story, as many critics, academics, reviewers and judges do, and note that because it is written by a white heterosexual male, it must possess merit. A phenomenon Hustvedt refers to as the ‘masculine enhancement effect’. Readers may not, as many do, pick up a book by a person of colour, and look for the traumatic, moral story at its heart.

Submissions for the 2015 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize were assessed blind. More than five hundred entries were equally divided between the judges, who returned after several weeks with a longlist of twenty-eight stories. This longlist was then reduced, over a number of rereads and discussions, to a shortlist of twelve diverse and ambitious stories, and finally to two runners-up and a winning story.