'The new novel from the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Australian author Alexis Wright, in a limited edition hardcover.
'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.' (Publication summary)
Chosen as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2024
'The writing of Praiseworthy was loosely guided by a collection of notes and treasured objects that helped fire the vision of the book, the total life-world – the multiple realities of characters such as Dance, the moth-er, flowing right through her dreaming. The shape of things that live in the heart, the life force of all worlds and of all peoples, the great harvest of sensibility, wisdom old and new, intellect, drive, sheer guts and tenacity – these were some of the ideas that I learnt from over a half century of work in the fight for Aboriginal rights.'(Introduction)
'“Praiseworthy,” Alexis Wright’s bracing satire of clashing worldviews in Australia, more than lives up to its name.'
'Alexis Wright wins the most prestigious literary prize in Australia for the second time.'
'Waanyi writer Alexis Wright has won the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel Praiseworthy, a 730-page epic about colonisation, Aboriginal sovereignty and climate change.'
Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet. It is simultaneously a hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty.' (Introduction)
'A few years ago I camped with my beloved in Jalmurark Campground, in Mangarayi and Yungman Country in the top end of the Northern Territory, near the property about which We of the Never Never was written by white woman Jeannie Gunn, who lived there for about a year. It was there that I was woken by the monstrous screams of feral donkeys, a noise that is used by sound designers all around the world whenever they need a terrifying, unearthly sound. And it was there I discovered for the first time that Australia has a feral donkey problem.' (Introduction)
Alexis Wright’s Expansive New Work
2023
26167007
2023
single work
podcast
'In this week’s ABR Podcast, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth reviews Alexis Wright’s new novel, Praiseworthy. Expectations are high: after all, Wright is the only author to have won both the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize. Praiseworthy, Hughes-d’Aeth argues, is a book unlike any other. Grounded in an Indigenous cosmology, combining realism with absurdism, it takes aim at its ‘one true enemy’: assimilation.'
Alexis Wright in Conversation
Ivor Indyk
(interviewer),
2023
26349207
2023
single work
podcast
interview
'This episode features a live event recording taken of a conversation between Alexis Wright and Ivor Indyk, to celebrate the publication of Wright’s new novel, Praiseworthy.
'Alexis Wright is a remarkable writer, originally hailing from the from the Waanyi nation in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her novel Carpentaria won the 2007 Miles Franklin award, and Wright was awarded the 2018 Stella Prize for her biography of “Tracker" Tilmouth. Praiseworthy is Wright’s fourth novel.' (Introduction)
'For more than a decade now, the Stella Prize, an award celebrating Australian women’s writing, has been changing Australia’s literary landscape. It has taken a monkey wrench to the way literary esteem is bestowed in this country. Its annual whack has shifted the calibration of what kinds of books are valued.' (Introduction)
'Acclaimed Waanyi writer Alexis Wright has made Australian literary history by being the first author to win the Stella Prize twice. This time, it’s for Praiseworthy, her fourth novel – her first in more than a decade.'
