This month Stella celebrates Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright, the winner of the 2024 Stella Prize. This is an excerpt from her conversation with Dr. Yves Rees at Western Sydney University Stella Day Out.
DR. YVES REES: This has been a huge year for you, and no doubt you’re feeling a bit weary, though probably happy as well. Looking back, how do you think you’ll remember 2024 and the acclaim that Praiseworthy has received this year?
ALEXIS WRIGHT:
It’s been an enormous year and it’s really unbelievable that the book has received all of the nominations and awards. I can’t believe it. I can’t even believe that I wrote the book. It’s been massive this year, it’s been a joy mostly, but it’s been exhausting. It can be hard for an author to talk about their work, I know I’m not the only one who feels like that, and a lot of the time when a book is finished, it’s finished. But this has continued on and because I have so much on my mind and I’m already a long way ahead in something else now, it’s been a juggle.
I couldn’t believe that the book won the Stella and the event at the State Library in Melbourne was just out of this world with [Dr. Yves Rees] and the other Stella judges, you just really celebrated the book. It was amazing, it was an incredible night. It just had such a great feel and you did that for me, you made it feel like a real celebration. It was totally pushed and shoved to Australia – I think people have been a bit afraid of it because it’s big and it’s so different to what’s being published at the moment. But for me, I think political books are necessary.
Then came along the Miles Franklin and, you know, how do you even fathom that? It just went one thing after the other. When the book was published last year, there was maybe a little bit of reluctance to take it on board. I think it is a serious piece of work and I think people saw that but just found it too enormous to take on and read. But with the Miles Franklin and the Stella Prize, there’s the machinery that goes with it – there’s so much enthusiasm and media coverage that just put the book right across the country. I’ve been getting phone calls and emails from the remotest places in Australia.
So, it’s been a big year and it’s still going. It’s probably just the start. But I can’t complain, who would have thought Praiseworthy would be picked up and is now in many, many homes in the country. It’s there, I don’t know if it’s being read, but it’s there! (Laughs) No, it is being read, I’ve been getting messages from readers and from young students who are reading it in class. Students have seen how they have been trained to read in a certain way and they can see that they have to find a different way of reading Praiseworthy. They can see there’s an expectation of literature that means a lot of books have this and that and then the end, and there’s nothing complex about it. But the students want more, it’s a complex world. It’s becoming more difficult, and they want to be able to understand more about what’s going on. But yes, great year!
“Fierce and gloriously funny, Praiseworthy is a genre-defiant epic of climate catastrophe proportions.”
About the Author
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 has won 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.
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.
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?
Explore the latest from stella
This month Stella celebrates Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright, the winner of the 2024 Stella Prize. This is an excerpt from her conversation …
Help change the story
As a not-for-profit organisation with ambitious goals, Stella relies on the generous support of donors to help fund our work.
Every donation is important to us and allows Stella to continue its role as the leading voice for gender equality and cultural change in Australian literature.
Stella is a not-for-profit organisation with DGR status. All donations of $2 or more are tax-deductible.
