Shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize
Praiseworthy – Alexis Wright
Fiction · Giramondo Publishing
About the Book
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
“Fierce and gloriously funny, Praiseworthy is a genre-defiant epic of climate catastrophe proportions.”
– 2024 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Alexis Wright
Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Wright has published three works of non-fiction: Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, an award-winning collective memoir of Aboriginal leader, Tracker Tilmouth. Her books have been published widely overseas, including in China, the US, the UK, Italy, France and Poland. She held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne. Wright is the only author to win both the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize. Her latest novel is Praiseworthy, which received the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction in 2023. She is the inaugural winner of the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
Further Reading
Reviews
“The most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century.” Samuel Rutter, New York Times Review of Books
“[Praiseworthy] is Wright’s most enraged, tragic and hopeful novel to date, with a magnificently upbeat denouement.” Jane Gleeson-White, The Conversation
“Praiseworthy is designed to challenge readers, with a repetitive, cyclical narrative that mirrors both the frustrating looping of Australia’s failures and an ancestral presence which itself leaps back and forth across time.” Steph Harmon, The Guardian
“Yet besides Indigenous storytelling, the novel’s vernacular poetry, flights of magic realism and lyrical interiority about internalised hatred nod to other ancestors, from Homer, Joyce, García Márquez and Fuentes to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Maya Jaggi, The Guardian UK
Links
Praiseworthy was nominated for the Dublin Literary Awards. Read the Nominating Library Comments.
Judges’ Report
A canon-crushing Australian novel for the ages.
Fierce and gloriously funny, Praiseworthy is a genre-defiant epic of climate catastrophe proportions. Part manifesto, part indictment, Alexis Wright’s real-life frustration at the indignities of the Anthropocene stalk the pages of this, her fourth novel.
That frustration is embodied by a methane-like haze over the once-tidy town of Praiseworthy. The haze catalyses the quest of protagonist Cause Man Steel. His search for a platinum donkey, muse for a donkey-transport business, is part of a farcical get-rich-quick scheme to capitalise on the new era of heat. Cause seeks deliverance for himself and his people to the blue-sky country of economic freedom.
Praiseworthy walks the same Country as companion novel, Carpentaria, published in 2006, and here, Wright demonstrates further mastery of form. Reflecting the landscape of the Queensland Gulf Country where the tale unfolds, Wright’s voice is operatic in intensity. Wright’s use of language and imagery is poetic and expansive, creating an immersive blak multiverse. Readers will be buoyed by Praiseworthy’s aesthetic and technical quality; and winded by the tempestuous pace of Wright’s political satire.
Praiseworthy belies its elegy-like form to stand firm in the author’s Waanyi worldview and remind us that this is not the end times for that or any Country. Instead it asks, which way my people? Which way humanity?
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