Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy wins 2024 Voss Literary Prize
Alexis Wright has won the 2024 Voss Literary Prize for her epic novel Praiseworthy. This puts the number of awards the book has won at six, of which include the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Stella Prize, and the UK’s James Tait Black Prize for Fiction.
The Voss Literary Prize aims to acknowledge the best Australian novel published in the preceding year. Praiseworthy was selected from a shortlist of five; another book published by Giramondo, Hospital by Sanya Rushdi, was a finalist. The winner’s announcement was made on 2 December 2024.
The judges praised the novel in the following terms:
Praiseworthy is a work for the ages, a capacious Aboriginal epic based in the Queensland Gulf Country. It wrestles with the universal question, how to survive in a world corrupted by greed and stupidity?
Alexis Wright’s answer lies in storytelling, in building an all-encompassing country of the mind rooted in ancient storylines but set in a continuous and recurring present where people and spirits interact, where the hell fires of colonisation hang like a grief cloud over the land, and where a culture dreamer (variously known as Cause Man Steel, Widespread Planet, and Omnicide) embarks on a quest to save civilisation (and make himself a motza) by harnessing the hauling power of five million wild donkeys.
In asserting the healing possibilities of story, Wright eviscerates its opposite, that particular Canberra narrative, amplified by social media, about the abuse of alcohol and children in Aboriginal communities. This material, which describes the breakdown of Aboriginal culture and society, is so ubiquitous that the residents of the tiny town of Praiseworthy are sucked in by it: they want to trade their integrity for the trinkets of white lifestyle and minor positions of authority.
It is here that Wright’s critique of white denial of Aboriginal rights is both stringent and plangent. Tommyhawk, eight-year-old fascist son of Cause, is obsessed by the rhetoric of the Intervention. In the absence of a counter-narrative, he believes all Aboriginal men are paedophiles and reports Aboriginal Sovereignty, his teenaged brother, to the police for marrying (in a traditional sense) his fifteen-year-old sweetheart. Tommyhawk wills Aboriginal Sovereignty to drown himself, all the while believing that the golden-haired Minister for Aboriginal Affairs will save him from his dysfunctional family and carry him off to live with her in Parliament House.
Much has been written about Praiseworthy and the awards it has garnered for its poetic and expansive language, its exceptional mastery of craft and astonishing emotional range. Wright has gifted her readers a total life-world, a fantastical imaginary that challenges western knowledge, logic and expectations, enriches Australian literature, and gives sovereignty to Indigenous voices.
The 2024 judging panel comprised Kate Cantrell (University of Southern Queensland), Stephanie Green (Griffith University), Elaine Lindsay (chair, Australian Catholic University), Deborah Pike (The University of Notre Dame), and Emmett Stinson (University of Tasmania).
Other books by Wright include the novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, and the collective memoir Tracker.
