Praiseworthy
**Winner, Miles Franklin Literary Award 2024**
**Winner, Stella Prize 2024**
**Winner, Queensland Literary Awards, Fiction Book Award**
**Winner, The James Tait Black Prize, Fiction 2024**
**Winner, ALS Gold Medal 2024**
**Shortlisted, The Dublin Literary Award 2024**
**Shortlisted, Queensland Literary Awards 2023, Work of State Significance**
**Shortlisted, Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award 2024**
The new novel from the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Australian 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.
'Monumental... calls to mind the work of Thomas Bernhard or the quiet rage of Dostoyevsky... Praiseworthy blew me away.' – Australian Book Review
Praise for Alexis Wright:
‘The writing is the best in the country, some of the best in the world; we call to mind Alexis Wright when they talk about our country’s great literary voice.’ — Tara June Winch
‘I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of [Alexis Wright’s] work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her “collective memoir” of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.’ — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the novels Carpentaria, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, and The Swan Book, winner of the ALS Gold Medal, 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, a collective memoir of Aboriginal leader, Tracker Tilmouth which won the Stella Prize. 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, and is now an Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University.
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