Alexis Wright makes history with Miles Franklin, Stella wins in same year

Alexis Wright’s mighty year has got significantly mightier after her epic satire Praiseworthy was named winner of the $60,000 Miles Franklin award. Wright becomes the first writer to win both the Miles and the Stella prizes for the same book, having already picked up the award for best writing by an Australian woman in May.

Wright is now a two-time winner of both prizes, having previously won the Miles in 2007 for Carpentaria and the Stella in 2018 for Tracker, her multi-voiced biography of Aboriginal activist Tracker Tilmouth.

Wright said winning both prizes was “monumental” and the success of Praiseworthy and its publication in the UK and the US, where The New York Times described it as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, had made it a huge year for her.

Alexis Wright says we need works of scale to really think about issues.Credit: Wolter Peeters

The other books on the Miles shortlist were: Only Sound Remains, Hossein Asgari; Wall, Jen Craig; Anam, André Dao; The Bell of the World, Gregory Day, and Hospital, Sanya Rushdi.

The judges described the 700-plus pages of Praiseworthy as “an astonishing feat of storytelling and sovereign imagination”. This masthead’s review said it was “an abundant odyssey that contains a formidable vision of Australia’s future. This is a long journey through the imagination, a novel both urgent and deeply contemplated.”

Praiseworthy is the 73-year-old Waanyi writer’s fourth novel and utilises magical realism, Indigenous myth, lush prose and political anger. It begins with a foul haze settling over Praiseworthy, a fictional town in the Gulf country of Queensland, where family patriarch Cause Man Steel has come up with a unique scheme to create a secure future for his people in the face of climate change: harnessing donkey power to create an Aboriginal transport conglomerate.

Cause Man is obsessed with adding to the feral donkeys he has already corralled in the town cemetery, much to the irritation of his wife, Dance, and his sworn enemy, the albino Aboriginal mayor, Ice Pick. Dance can think only of moths and butterflies, while their sons, Aboriginal Sovereignty and the young Tommyhawk, have their own problems: one disappears into the gulf, while the other believes the media characterisation of local men as paedophiles and that he will be adopted by a white politician and live safely in Parliament House.

Wright spent 10 years working on Praiseworthy. “I wanted it to be a book that reflects the spirit of the times and that it would be a big book in more ways than one,” she said. “I was thinking very deeply about global warming and how we’re responding to it. And how would an Aboriginal community that’s not getting much support … take their culture into the future.”

The Howard Government’s intervention in Indigenous communities in 2007 was also on her mind.

“That was a deep concern and how Aboriginal will was silenced during that, and with accusations that communities were rampant with paedophiles and that Aboriginal parents don’t love their children how white people love their children. I was thinking how that might affect very impressionable young Aboriginal children who heard all this.”

Praiseworthy has been greeted with great acclaim, but some commentators have claimed it is inaccessible and lamented that it is not a traditional novel.

Wright dismisses such talk. “When I began writing I wanted to write from the sovereignty of my own mind. I didn’t want to be told how an Aboriginal person should write or what Australian fiction is because I think Australian literature can be much, much bigger than what it is and I wanted to write in an authentic way as well. So I wasn’t going to be put in anyone’s box and [the writing] wasn’t going to toe the line.”

She said people might not like big, challenging books such as Praiseworthy, but they were not unusual.

“It’s happening all over the world. We can do it too; we can do it better. It’s not a big deal,” she said. “I believe that we need works of scale to really think about some of the issues, ideas and concerns to become more compassionate and be better able to deal with the future.”

But what about her future? There is a new book to be written, for which she has done a lot of research, but admits has been a long time coming. Fortunately, she’s had a breakthrough, and it came to her in a dream.

“I’ve toyed with so many different ways of beginning this work and it came to me in a wonderful dream the other night. It was a gift; this is what you got to do. And that’s how it’ll start.” A dream to match her dream year.

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