Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright wins 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Showing all posts tagged: Alexis Wright

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright wins 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award

2 August 2024

As called/guessed by yours truly, Praiseworthy, the 2023 novel by Waanyi/Gulf of Carpentaria based Australian author Alexis Wright, has won the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Praiseworthy has cleaned up on the awards circuit since publication, also winning the other major Australian literary award, the Stellar Prize.

Wright also won the Miles Franklin in 2007, with Carpentaria. In winning this year, she joins an elite band of Australian writers to win the esteemed prize multiple times, including Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Patrick White, Michelle de Kretser, Kim Scott, and Thomas Keneally.

The 2024 Miles Franklin shortlist for Australian fiction

2 July 2024

The shortlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin literary award for works of Australian fiction, was announced earlier today. Of the ten novels named on the longlist in May, the following six titles have been included today:

Only Sound Remains, by Hossein Asgari
Wall, by Jen Craig
Anam, by André Dao
The Bell of the World, by Gregory Day
Hospital, by Sanya Rushdi
Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright

Each author will receive five-thousand dollars for making the cut. Kate Evans, writing for ABC News, describes this year’s shortlist as one of the most culturally diverse, and notes that should a woman author win this year, that will be eight times in a row a woman has won.

My money would be on Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, which has been doing well on the award’s circuit. The 2024 winner will be unveiled on Thursday 1 August 2024.

The 2024 Miles Franklin longlist for Australian novel writing

16 May 2024

Well this is exciting, the longlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin literary award for Australian novel writing, has been published. Not sure how I missed the official announcement, but I went searching for a date the longlist would be unveiled, and instead found the longlist itself:

Only Sound Remains, by Hossein Asgari
Wall, by Jen Craig
Strangers at the Port, by Lauren Aimee Curtis
Anam, by André Dao
The Bell of the World, by Gregory Day
Edenglassie, by Melissa Lucashenko
The Sitter, by Angela O’Keefe
Hospital, by Sanya Rushdi
Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood
Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright

Praiseworthy, which won the 2024 Stella Prize, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, are notable inclusions. I loved Wood’s 2019 novel, The Weekend, and I guess a few other people also, as the film option was sold a couple of years ago, and a stage adaptation was also made.

I can’t — as yet — find a date the shortlist will be announced. Come to that, I couldn’t even find a date the longlist would be published, I just seemed to stumble upon it last night. I can’t figure out why they need to be so elusive about these things. The Miles Franklin is after all one of the highlights of the Australian literary calendar.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright, wins the 2024 Stella Prize

3 May 2024

Queensland/Waanyi author Alexis Wright, has been named winner of the 2024 Stella Prize for Australian literature, for works by women and non-binary writers, with Praiseworthy, a novel set in the north of Australia.

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.

Beejay Silcox, chair of the 2024 Stella judges panel, described Wright’s novel, which was published in 2023, as a great Australian novel, and mighty in every regard:

Praiseworthy is mighty in every conceivable way: mighty of scope, mighty of fury, mighty of craft, mighty of humour, mighty of language, mighty of heart.

Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel — perhaps the great Australian novel — it is also a great Waanyi novel. And it is written in the wild hope that, one day, all Australian readers might understand just what that means. I do not understand. Not yet. But I can feel history calling to me in these pages. Calling to all of us. Imagine if we listened.

Praiseworthy is an epic novel. Figuratively. And literally. With a page count of over seven-hundred, I’ve so far not been game enough to pick it up. I’m struggling to read novels with less than half as many pages. This is also Wright’s second Stella win, her 2017 novel Tracker, took out the 2018 prize.

Alexis Wright wins 2023 Lifetime Achievement in Literature Award

18 September 2023

Australian author Alexis Wright, a past winner of both the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the Stella Prize, has been awarded the 2023 Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council) Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature:

Alexis is an author of ground-breaking works across a number of literary genres. She is a highly decorated and awarded author who writes extraordinarily important work that sits in your consciousness. Her novels interpret the past, present, and future tense and challenge the readers’ comprehension. She has changed how we think about the meaning of storytelling and time.

Creative Australia awards were also presented for music, dance, emerging and experimental arts, visual arts, theatre, and community arts and cultural development.