Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy wins 2024 Miles Franklin Award
Alexis Wright has won the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her epic novel Praiseworthy.
The award was announced at a ceremony in Sydney on 1 September. The win marks another achievement in Australian literature for Wright, with Praiseworthy the only book to have won both the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin.
Wright was previously awarded the Miles Franklin in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria. She joins an esteemed group of authors who have won the award twice, including Michelle de Kretser, Kim Scott, Thomas Keneally and Patrick White. Wright receives $60,000 in prize money.
On winning the award, Wright said: ‘I am both amazed and humbled to win the 2024 Miles Franklin Award for Praiseworthy. To win a Miles Franklin a second time is monumental. I wanted to make Praiseworthy a big book in more ways than one. I wanted to capture the spirit of our times.’
Praiseworthy has also won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction and the ALS Gold Medal, and was shortlisted for the world’s richest literary prize, the Dublin Literary Award. It was also shortlisted for two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance. It has been hailed by the New York Times as the ‘most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century’.
The judges praised the novel in the following terms:
Praiseworthy is an astonishing feat of storytelling and sovereign imagination. It is a capacious work in which Alexis Wright takes on the role of creative custodian, singing the songs of unceded lands. She bears witness to the catastrophic transformations wrought by white fantasies, against which Indigenous ingenuity still stands, its connection to Country unbroken. Wright’s literary technique is a superb mash-up of different languages, ancient and modern, and displays an exceptional mastery of craft. The novel is imbued with astonishing emotional range, deploying Wright’s signature humour despite its powerful sense of the tragic. Through its sheer ambition, astringency and audacity, Praiseworthy redraws the map of Australian literature and expands the possibilities of fiction.
Australia’s first literary award, established in 1957 and managed by Perpetual, the Miles Franklin promotes the ‘advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature,’ and recognises a ‘novel of the highest literary merit‘ that ‘presents Australian life in any of its phases.’
The 2024 judging panel comprises Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian of the State Library of NSW and Chair; literary scholar, A/Prof Jumana Bayeh; literary scholar and translator, Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty; book critic, Dr James Ley; and author and literary scholar, Prof Hsu-Ming Teo.
Other books by Wright include the novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, and the collective memoir Tracker.
Media coverage
- ‘Alexis Wright wins second Miles Franklin prize for Praiseworthy’ The Guardian
- ‘Alexis Wright makes history with Miles Franklin, Stella wins in same year’ SMH
- ‘Alexis Wright wins the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her epic novel Praiseworthy’ ABC News
- ‘Praiseworthy makes history: Alexis Wright is the first author to win the Miles Franklin and the Stella Prize’ The Conversation
- ‘Wright awarded 2024 Miles Franklin for ‘Praiseworthy’, becomes two-time winner’ Books+Publishing
- ‘First Nations writer Alexis Wright wins second Miles Franklin Literary Award’ National Indigenous Times
- ‘Alexis Wright makes literary history’ ABC listen
- ‘Alexis Wright wins the Miles Franklin Literary Award, again’ The Australian
- ‘Praiseworthy author Alexis Wright wins Miles Franklin Award’ The New Daily
- ‘Author Alexis Wright Makes History Winning 2024 Miles Franklin and Stella Awards’ Broadsheet
- ‘Alexis Wright Is the 2024 Miles Franklin Winner’ Read This
- ‘Praiseworthy: why Alexis Wright’s ‘staggering’ epic is sweeping prizes – and challenging readers’ The Guardian
