Alexis Wright
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright is shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award
Giramondo Publishing congratulates Alexis Wright, whose highly acclaimed novel Praiseworthy has been shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. One of the richest literary prizes in the world, the international award is presented each year to a novel written or translated into English, and aims to promote excellence in world literature.
Praiseworthy is one of six shortlisted books chosen by an international panel of judges from the longlist of 70 books. Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation, is the first Australian to be shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award since Hannah Kent and Richard Flanagan in 2015.
Praiseworthy has won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, and is currently longlisted for The Stella Prize and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. It was published last year in the United Kingdom by And Other Stories, and this year in the United States by New Directions. The New York Times has described Praiseworthy as ‘the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century’.
Read the Dublin Literary Award judges’ comments below.
Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a wonder of twenty-first century fiction. This modernist more-than-an-allegory about a pernicious haze that settles over a northern Australia town yokes a painfully contemporary tale of political, social and climatic disaster to a narrative consciousness embodying 65 000 years of aboriginal survival. Intimate while epic, the family drama at its center reads like chamber music on a symphonic scale. Wright has authored a blisteringly funny book, replete with situations and speech that elicit wild laughter—a laughter through tears we may recognize from our readings of Beckett and Kafka. She has also written a beautiful one: time and again Praiseworthy delivers unforget- table images, from aerial rivers; of dancing butterflies to hordes of stinking donkeys. Startlingly original, fiercely political, uncompromising in every respect, Praiseworthy expands the possibility of the novel form.
The Dublin Literary Award is unique in that books are first nominated by libraries from cities around the world. Praiseworthy was nominated by the National Library of Australia.
The winner will be announced on May 23 at the International Literature Festival Dublin.
Alexis Wright wins the inaugural Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature
The acclaimed Australian author Alexis Wright has won the inaugural Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
Write Creative Australia: ‘Alexis [Wright] 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.’
Wright’s award-winning works include the novels Praiseworthy, Carpentaria and The Swan Book, and the collective memoir Tracker. Praiseworthy, her most recent book, won the 2023 University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, with the judges describing it as a ‘simply astonishing’ novel that combines ‘farce, satire, tragedy, the colloquial, myth, pun, repetition, elegy, and the epic’.
‘I feel deeply honoured and really humbled to receive this award,’ Wright told ABC Arts of her Lifetime Achievement. ‘But I also want to say, I’m not finished yet. I’ve got a lot more writing to come.’
Watch the full ABC Arts video profile of Alexis Wright on YouTube.
Alexis Wright titles sold to North America and UK
Giramondo is delighted to announce the following international rights sales for Alexis Wright.
In North America, New Directions will publish Alexis Wright’s forthcoming novel, Praiseworthy, and her bestselling classic, Carpentaria, in 2024. Barbara Epler, President and Publisher, writes:
I stand in awe of Alexis Wright. She washes away the dust on all my everyday notions of what fiction can do. Her voice – with its unique and enormous radiance – is what makes Praiseworthy so splendid and unfathomable. And yet it is also a book so immediate and palpable. The vivacity and utter truth of all her characters; the muchness of her echoes and returns; the untrammeled inner light that shines out of the magic whirl she conjures from weaving history’s shapes and misshapes into an absolutely other cosmology of time; the quixotic quest for the platonic ideal platinum donkey; the yearning for Aboriginal Sovereignty; the sweeping overall power to bend time, landscape, and dimensionality – along with the reader’s mind – it all just knocks me out.
New Directions has long wanted to publish Alexis Wright so it is with special pleasure that we look forward to blowing open new doors in the minds of American readers with both her epic new masterpiece Praiseworthy and her already recognized novel of genius Carpentaria.
In the United Kingdom, And Other Stories will publish Praiseworthy in 2023 and Wright’s award-winning work of collective memoir, Tracker, in 2025. Tara Tobler, Senior Editor, And Other Stories, writes:
Praiseworthy is extraordinary. It’s a wonder. Page after page of these exploding miraculous sentences. Its satire is eviscerating and moving, its momentum and energy (astonishingly) sustained, and the power of the intelligence behind it practically throbbing. It was immediately clear to us how essential this work is, both in its satire and in its larger arguments about contemporary Indigeneity, about climate change, about interventionist government policy. It’s staggering. It’s brutal. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. Wright has jumped her own bar in terms of energy, experiment, and performance – nobody can catch her now.
For further enquiries, please contact: rights@giramondopublishing.com
Giramondo eBooks available now
Selected Giramondo titles are now available as eBooks, and can be purchased through (in alphabetical order):
Amazon, Booki.sh, Fishpond, iBooks, Kobo, Ebooks.com, Ebrary, Netlibrary, Read How You Want, Overdrive, ReadCloud
The digital editions offered are:
Brian Castro’s Street to Street
Alike Melike Ülgezer’s The Memory of Salt
Jess Huon’s The Dark Wet
Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch and A History of Books
Evelyn Juers’ House of Exile
Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing
Sara Knox’s The Orphan Gunner
Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
Mireille Juchau’s Burning In
Brian Castro’s The Garden Book
Nick Jose’s Original Face and
John Hughes’ The Idea of Home
We are developing our digital publishing program. If there are any titles you would like to read on your device, please email Alice, alicegATgiramondopublishingDOTcom.
Giramondo at the Sydney Writers Festival
Giramondo writers will be appearing at the following Sydney Writers Festival events
For more information, of to book tickets, visit the Sydney Writers Festival
Tuesday 18th May
Inside the Westside Writer’s Group
Bankstown Youth Development Service
6-8 Bankstown City Plaza
Bankstown
6:00 pm -9:00 pm
Join some of Western Sydney’s most exciting writers for an evening of readings with live editing and critical feedback from editor Ivor Indyk and special guest author Alexis Wright. The Westside Writers Group is supported by Giramondo and BYDS, and includes writers Michael Mohammed Ahmed, Lachlan Brown, Rebecca Landon, Peter Polites, Luke Carman, Fiona Wright, Felicity Castagna, Lina Jabbir and Susie Ahmed.
Food and refreshments will be provided.
Thursday 20th May
Changing Places
Sydney Theatre, Richard Wherrett Studio
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
For an immigrant the place of arrival can be alien and challenging and, all too often cruelly hostile, however much the newcomer tries to adapt. Alison Booth’s novel ‘Stillwater Creek’ tells the story of a Latvian concentration camp survivor and her daughter trying to fit in to an Australian small town in the 1950s. Kim Cheng Boey’s collection of essays ‘Between Stations’ is a rumination on wandering and belonging as the author travels the world before migrating from Singapore to Australia, while Natasha Solomon’s charming ‘Mr Rosenblum’s List’ chronicles the efforts of a German Jewish refugee to become an English gentleman.
Friday, 21st May
Poetry on the Harbour
Bangarra Mezzanine
10:00am – 11:00
Kim Cheng Boey, Adam Aitken and Judith Beveridge Hosted by Ivor Indyk.
Poetry: The Last Genre Standing?
Bangarra Mezzanine
4:00pm – 5:00pm
Will poetry outlast the novel in the digital age? Some say it’s the novelists who should be worried and that poetry ? unique among writing forms ? cannot be superseded. Robert Gray, Michael Palmer and Jennifer Maiden join Mark Tredinnick in discussing the likely effect of digital technologies on poetry.
Poems to Share
Heritage Pier, Upstairs
6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Eleven outstanding Australian poets – Kate Fagan, Lachlan Brown, Adam Aitken, Lindsay Tuggle, Greg McLaren, Elizabeth Allen, Fiona Wright, Joanne Burns, Judith Bishop, Andy Quan, Keri Glastonbury – come together to celebrate the work of the Red Room Company (redroomcompany.org). The audience is seated at tables with poets, to hear readings as well as a discussion on sharing. This event coincides with the release of Corban & Blair and Red Room’s Poems to Share card set, featuring the work of 40 Australian poets. Hosted by Johanna Featherstone.
To enter, you must bring something, anything to share, such as twig, a monetary donation or a poem.
Saturday 22nd May
Brian Castro
Sydney Theatre, Richard Wherrett Studio
11:30am – 12:30am
Brian Castro’s body of work stands as testament to his ingenious adaptation of fictional forms, with his latest novel ‘The Bath Fugues’‚ continuing his creative use of musical structure. He talks Bernadette Brennan about his rich prose style and the joyful play and provocation he brings to his writing.
Three Australias
Sydney Dance Company, Studio 4
1:00 – 2:00 pm
Three poets, three voices, three views of our country: Les Murray, Ali Cobby Eckerman and Kim Cheng Boey read from their work.
Reading Muster 7
Sydney Dance Company, Studio 4
4:00pm – 5:00pm
Australian writers pass the word around, reading their own work. Kate Veitch, Shirley Walker, Jack Marx and Tom Cho are rounded up by our Drover.
Late Nights at Number One
Number One Wine Bar
Goldfields House
1 Alfred Street
Circular Quay
9:30 pm – 11:30 pm
Enjoy a post-event drink or bite and listen to Jennifer Maiden, Adam Aitken and David Brooks read their poetry at the contemporary and relaxed Quayside wine bar, Number One (numberonewinebar.com). Your host: Patrick Muhlen-Schulte.
Sunday 23rd May
Poetry Anthology Overload?
Bangarra Mezzanine
11:30 am – 12:30 pm
For a small country we sure have a lot of poetry anthologies ? four at last count and more on the way. Two of them are represented here: Robert Adamson edited ‘Best Australian Poems 2009’ and Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray have just completed a thousand-page anthology. They explain their respective approaches to Susan Hayes.
Out of the box with Tom Cho
Museum of Contemporary Art
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
In ‘Look Who’s Morphing’, Tom Cho’s first book, his characters dance through pop culture arm-in-arm with the likes of Whitney Houston’s bodyguard, Godzilla and a Gulliver-sized cock-rock singer. It’s a bizarre, biting and utterly hilarious rollercoaster ride that’s been shortlisted for prizes all over the place.
Every week, FBi 94.5 dives into someone’s record collection to talk about the music they love, the life they lead and how the two interact. Tom is a fiction and freelance writer who has written short stories, zines, the occasional business plan, and even a fictional program for the Melbourne Writers Festival. He and FBi arts broadcaster Matt Levinson will go on a conversational journey into rock star fantasies, going Gaga over style and cock rock excesses ? with a rumoured exorcism thrown in for good measure.
Afternoon Tea and Readings
Heritage Pier, Upstairs
2:30 pm – 4:00 pm
A Sydney Writers’ Festival institution. A civilised and relaxing high tea with readings from poet Les Murray and novelists Brian Castro and Kirsten Tranter. Hosted by Geraldine Doogue.
Shanghai Express
Sydney Philharmonia Choir Studio
2:30pm – 3:30 pm
It takes more than a translator to publish your book in a foreign country. Giramondo Publisher Ivor Indyk talks to Patrizia van Daalen, senior rights and acquisitions manager for the private Chinese publishing firm Shanghai 99, about getting your book into China.
Research and Writing: Personal Journeys
Sydney Dance Company, Studio 1
4:00 – 5:00
‘The Nib’: CAL Waverley Library Award for Literature recognises excellence in literary research with its annual prize. Last year’s winner, Robert Gray (‘The Land I Came Through Last’), and shortlisted authors Greg de Moore (‘Tom Wills’) and John McDonald (‘Art of Australia’) talk about their books with Suzanne Leal.
Presented by Waverley Library and Copyright Agency Limited.