‘I feel as I have been talking to John all my adult life. He has been a touchstone to all my thoughts. It still aches whenever I go into a bookshop and realise that there is no new book by John.’

‘The monumentality of Praiseworthy is testament also to the duration of writerly attention and care, to an ethics of a sustained focus on painful injustice. The formal originality and scale of the novel stands as a response to the enormity of need but also to the depth of resources that survive.’ 

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy and Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital are both finalists to win one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards, the Miles Franklin.

‘It is my aim that readers, after reading Tintinnabulum, will find the world less fragmented and more interconnected, that language can be felt as an activating mechanism for wonder, joy and revelation.’

‘They were so close we could see the mottling and barring / of their feathers, layers of white and grey highlighted / with brown and charcoal chevrons, strong claws / gripping a branch.’

‘A book-length poem split into seven chapters, rock flight is about many things: settler violence, hyper-surveillance, birds, boycotts and my family. Parts of it are quite literally haunted.’

‘One of the first Chinese-language works about breast cancer, Mourning a Breast was considered groundbreaking for its time, delving into both the physical and psychological responses to the disease, exposing common myths about breast cancer and confronting the shame often associated with it.’

‘Song in the Grass feels to me like a record collection. It’s a handful of favourite albums, a box of lyrics, a soundtrack to living in the Blue Mountains while walking over ‘the long bridge of motherhood’, as the book might say. But it’s also an almanac of environmental care, and a love letter to poetry as an art that is most alive when shared in communities. With other players and listeners – just like music.’

‘If my Grandad had seen the future / he would have said, small acts of care / are worth leaving. He’d have painted / imitation grain on window casing / and planted Crystal Palace lobelia.’ 

‘A brilliant and experimental work of fiction that stretches the boundaries of the novel form in new and exciting ways. Engaged with matters of climate and justice, Praiseworthy’s innovativeness is matched only by its timeliness.’

‘In Chinese Fish, Yee cooks up a rich variety of poetic material into a book that is special and strange; this is poetry at its urgent and thrilling best.’

‘Astro Architecture sits within a future landscape. A speculative landscape of migration into Space, a movement of peoples and spiritualities working to decentre the colonial past, present and future of Space travel.’

Alexis Wright has made history by becoming the first author to win the Stella Prize for the second time with Praiseworthy, an epic work described by the judges as ‘a canon-crushing Australian novel for the ages.’

‘Many passages in Praiseworthy featured butterflies as if they were ‘force fields’, and an interpretation of this appeared when I flipped and rotated the swan image. The form dynamised the concept. A storm picks up on the front cover, pushes around the spine, and appears to tail out on the back cover.’

‘Radical metamorphic bodily changes occur throughout Naag Mountain during violent scenes and traumatic events, but most significantly, these transformations also take place throughout moments of deep love and celebration.’

Two Giramondo authors are shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize: Alexis Wright for her epic novel , and Sanya Rushdi for her deeply personal work of fiction, Hospital.