Alexis Wright has won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel, Praiseworthy.
In winning this year’s award, Alexis joins a distinguished group of two-time winners including Michelle de Kretser, Kim Scott, Thomas Keneally and Patrick White. Alexis won the 2007 award for her novel, Carpentaria.
Read our book review of Praiseworthy
On winning the award, Wright said: ‘I am both amazed and humbled to win the 2024 Miles Franklin Award for Praiseworthy. To win a Miles Franklin a second time is monumental. I wanted to make Praiseworthy a big book in more ways than one. I wanted to capture the spirit of our times.’
Established through the will of My Brilliant Career author, Stella Miles Franklin, for the ‘advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature,’ the Miles Franklin Literary Award recognises a novel of ‘the highest literary merit’ that presents ‘Australian life in any of its phases.’
Alexis will receive $60,000 in prize money.
When describing this year’s winning novel, the judges said, ‘Praiseworthy is 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. She bears witness to the catastrophic transformations wrought by white fantasies, against which Indigenous ingenuity still stands, its connection to Country unbroken. Wright’s literary technique is a superb mash-up of different languages, ancient and modern, and displays an exceptional mastery of craft. The novel is imbued with astonishing emotional range, deploying Wright’s signature humour despite its powerful sense of the tragic. Through its sheer ambition, astringency and audacity, Praiseworthy redraws the map of Australian literature and expands the possibilities of fiction.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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 Praiseworthy, 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. .
She is the first author to win the Stella Prize twice – for Tracker in 2018, and for Praiseworthy in 2024. She held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne, and was honoured with the title of Distinguished Professor at Western Sydney University.
Alexis is the inaugural winner of the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
