And Other Stories will publish Praiseworthy and Tracker by the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Australian author Alexis Wright in the UK and Europe.
Alexis Wright on the books’ acquisition: ‘I am delighted that And Other Stories will bring my work to UK readers.’
And here’s what our senior editor Tara Tobler had to say on the acquisition: ‘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.’
About Praiseworthy:
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days. It will publish in Australia with Giramondo in April 2023 and in October with And Other Stories in UK and Europe.
About Tracker:
A collective memoir of the charismatic Aboriginal leader, political thinker and entrepreneur Tracker Tilmouth, who died in Darwin in 2015 at the age of 62.
Taken from his family as a child and brought up in a mission on Croker Island, Tracker Tilmouth worked tirelessly for Aboriginal self-determination, creating opportunities for land use and economic development in his many roles, including Director of the Central Land Council of the Northern Territory.
Tracker was a visionary, a strategist and a projector of ideas, renowned for his irreverent humour and his determination to tell things the way he saw them. Having known him for many years, Alexis Wright interviewed Tracker, along with family, friends, colleagues, and the politicians he influenced, weaving his and their stories together in a manner reminiscent of the work of Nobel Prize–winning author Svetlana Alexievich. The book is as much a testament to the powerful role played by storytelling in contemporary Aboriginal life as it is to the legacy of an extraordinary man. On publication in Australia in 2017 it was awarded the Stella Prize, the Magarey Medal and the Queensland Literary Award
Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Wright has published three works of non-fiction: Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, an award-winning collective memoir of Aboriginal leader, Tracker Tilmouth. Her books have been published widely overseas, including in China, the US, the UK, Italy, France and Poland. She held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne between 2017–2022. Wright is the only author to win both the Miles Franklin Award (in 2007 for Carpentaria) and the Stella Prize (in 2018 for Tracker). Her third novel, Praiseworthy, will be published by Giramondo in April 2023.