Alexis Wright - Paiseworthy

Winner of the Stella Prize
Winner of the Miles Franklin

The new novel from the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author Alexis Wright.

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.

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. She is the author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria, The Swan Book, and, most recently, Praiseworthy. Her works of non-fiction include Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, the 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, the Netherlands and Poland. Wright has won numerous literary awards, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Carpentaria and Praiseworthy, as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Queensland Literary Award for Praiseworthy, which was also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Wright is the first author to win the Stella Prize twice (for Tracker and Praiseworthy), and Praiseworthy is the only book to have received both the Stella and the Miles Franklin awards. She held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne, and has received honorary titles at universities including the University of Melbourne, Western Sydney University and the University of Queensland. She is the inaugural winner of the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and the winner of the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature.

Paperback
736 pages