Author Wright nominated for The Australian’s Australian of the Year for multi-award-winning Praiseworthy
Waanyi author Alexis Wright has earned a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year for her literary talent and success.
Alexis Wright fiercely champions Indigenous Australian history, culture and experience with her vivid storytelling.
It’s been a big year for the 73-year-old writer, a member of the Waanyi people from Queensland’s Gulf of Carpentaria, who picked up a long list of history-making honours and nominations for her latest novel, Praiseworthy.
As a result of these recent accolades, as well as her long-term contributions to literature and culture, Wright has been nominated for The Australian’s Australian of the Year award.
While she has won an impressive number of literary prizes throughout her career, this is Wright’s first nomination for The Australian’s award, which has been honouring the nation’s most extraordinary and inspiring citizens since 1971.
Wright made history with Praiseworthy, becoming the first author to win the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award for the same work.
She was already the only person to have won the two prizes for separate works, having been awarded the Miles Franklin for her second novel, Carpentaria, in 2007, and the Stella for Tracker, her “collective memoir” of Arrernte activist Tracker Tilmouth, in 2018. Her win in 2024 also made her the first to win the Stella twice.
The Miles Franklin judges described Wright’s work as “an astonishing feat of storytelling and sovereign imagination”.
“It is a capacious work in which Alexis Wright takes on the role of creative custodian, singing the songs of unceded lands,” the judges said.
“Through its sheer ambition, astringency and audacity, Praiseworthy redraws the map of Australian literature and expands the possibilities of fiction.”
Accepting the award in August, Wright said she “never expects things like this”, calling her second win “monumental and unbelievable”.
She described Praiseworthy as “a book that tried to capture the spirit of our times, and to tell a story of the growing complexity about what happens to people caught in a world controlled and manipulated by others”.
In her Stella Award acceptance speech in May, Wright said she was inspired to write the novel after asking some “hard questions about climate change, and the concerns I have about the survival of our ancient culture”.
“How do we survive an uncertain future?” she asked.
“In Praiseworthy, I looked at the reality of our circumstances and what it would mean to face the challenge of living on a burning planet and carrying our culture and ancient wisdom into the future. I wanted to capture this spirit of the times at home and across the world, and for a work of literature that was not just about ourselves, but that was also capable of capturing the beauty and joy of all things, the big and the small.
“I believe literature must meet the scale of what is happening in the world,” she said, referring to the novel’s exploration of societal issues, including the legacy of the Howard government’s 2007 intervention in remote Indigenous communities.
Praiseworthy also won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2024, and the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award at the Queensland Literary Awards in 2023, and made six other shortlists, and one longlist.
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