Waanyi writer Alexis Wright has won the 2024 Stella Prize, worth $60,000, for her novel Praiseworthy, a 700-page odyssey set in a fictional town in northern Australia.
Wright is the first person to win the award twice, after taking out the Stella in 2018 for Tracker, her collective memoir of Aboriginal leader and economist Bruce “Tracker” Tilmouth.
Fiona Sweet, Stella CEO, said Praiseworthy was “a genre-bending, canon-breaking novel that has been described by international media as the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”.
In 2024, the Stella Prize — a literary award for women and non-binary writers — received 227 entries.
“It’s been a very big year for women’s literature in Australia,” Wright tells ABC Arts.
“I’m truly honoured that Praiseworthy has won the Stella this year and joins the company of all the prestigious other winners of the mighty Stella Prize.”
Beejay Silcox, Judges’ Chair, said: “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.”
The 2024 Stella Prize judges praised the novel for showing the same mastery of form evident in Wright’s earlier work Carpentaria, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007.
“Reflecting the landscape of the Queensland Gulf Country where the tale unfolds, Wright’s voice is operatic in intensity,” the judges said in their report.
“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.”
‘An important book’
The novel centres around Cause Steel, his wife Dance, and their sons, Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk, as a mysterious haze cloud descends on their hometown of Praiseworthy.
Wright says she began work on Praiseworthy and Tracker at the same time about 10 years ago, but finished Tracker first.
“It takes me a long time to write in the way that I do,” she says.
“I knew Praiseworthy was going to take a lot of work, and I wanted to try to meet the scale of what is happening in the world right now.”
Praiseworthy, Wright’s fourth novel, is the product of her “deep thinking” about issues such as climate change and Aboriginal sovereignty.
The same day Wright won the Miles Franklin for Carpentaria — June 21, 2007 — then-prime minister John Howard announced the controversial Northern Territory Emergency Response, a policy known as the Intervention, which saw the introduction of measures such as alcohol bans and income management in Aboriginal communities.
“The Intervention was a big part of what was happening at the time of writing this book, [as well as] unprecedented climate change disasters and global viruses, the pandemic [and] war,” she tells ABC RN’s The Book Show.
“These are huge issues, and maybe they’re too big for literature — some people might say that — but I really think that we have to join the conversation … as writers, about where we’re heading, how we’re getting there and what it will mean to all people in the world and the planet itself.”
Wright describes Praiseworthy as “an important book” that, at its heart, is about survival.
“It’s asking … what’s plan A and what’s plan B? Or is there any plan at all?”
‘Build it big’
Wright’s second Stella win confirms her position as one of Australia’s most accomplished and innovative writers, but her path to literary success hasn’t been without obstacles.
The Carpentaria manuscript was famously rejected by every major Australian publishing house before Ivor Indyk at Giramondo picked it up.
“He respected what I was trying to do,” she says.
Wright wishes more publishers would follow Giramondo’s example and take risks on new work.
“The publishing world is a bit stuck. It needs to become more exciting and … be more ambitious and be more visionary and support writers to go on those journeys into new ways of writing and exploring, expressing what’s happening and bring the readership with them,” she says.
“I challenge all publishers to get with the story and build it, build it big and build it mighty.”
Since she published her first novel, Plains of Promise, in 1997, Wright has sought to constantly break new ground as a writer.
She says her goal has always been to challenge herself “to find a better way of writing fiction, in a way that suited a country like this with the oldest living culture in the world”.
Wright looked to international writers in developing her distinctive style.
“I studied writers from all over the world, particularly writers who had a long unbroken tradition with their own country,” she tells ABC RN’s Awaye!.
She has taken great inspiration from the late Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, whose influence is felt in Praiseworthy’s timeless, fable-like quality.
“In Western-style literature … there’s always this idea that there’s a start, middle, finish,” Wright says.
“That was a big struggle for me … because the world isn’t this linear thing.”
Wright’s risk-taking is paying off, with Praiseworthy winning the 2023 University of Queensland Fiction Book Award as well as the Stella.
The novel has also earned international attention, appearing on the shortlists of the International Dublin Literary Award and the UK-based James Tait Black Prize for Fiction.
“It’s wonderful that the book is getting that sort of recognition,” she says.
“It pushes Australian literature into a wider audience, and people are taking notice of what’s happening here.”