Praiseworthy
Winner of the 2023 Queensland Award for Literary Fiction
In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, Cause Man Steel is chasing a mad vision: to futureproof his people against the climate crisis and to secure their economic independence via a nation-wide feral donkey transport scheme. Exhausted by her husband’s madness, Dance Steel, the moth-er in constant motion, takes solace in butterflies and would like to repatriate her mixed-race family to China. Meanwhile the suicide of Aboriginal Sovereignty, their eldest, plunges Praiseworthy into a frenzy of mourning and a desperate search for his remains. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a sharp satire for the end of days, all told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned.
More Info
- Alexis Wright wrote about the 2019-2020 black summer bushfires for The Guardian – you can read the full article here.
- You can read The Monthly‘s profile of Alexis Wright here.
- Alexis Wright spoke to ABC Australia about Praiseworthy in April 2023 – the recording is available to listen to here.
- The judges of the 2023 Queensland Award for Literary Fiction had this to say about Praiseworthy: ‘The great Moana Jackson declared the doctrine of discovery a legal fiction. In Praiseworthy, farce, satire, tragedy, the colloquial, myth, pun, repetition, elegy, and the epic expose the absurdity of the doctrine and the everyday lies, habits and horrors keeping it in place. Praiseworthy is simply astonishing.’