Wright wins 2024 ALS Gold Medal

The winner of the 2024 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal is Alexis Wright for Praiseworthy (Giramondo).

The win is the third for Wright, who joins Patrick White and David Malouf as the only authors to have won the ALS Gold Medal three times.

This year’s judges, Elizabeth McMahon (chair), Ali Alizadeh and Ann Vickery, described Praiseworthy as ‘a novel for and of our time… hilarious, furious, poetical and painful’. The novel was chosen from a shortlist of seven announced last month.

Praiseworthy previously won the Stella Prize, the Fiction Book Award at Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and the James Tait Black Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Awarded annually for an outstanding literary work published in the preceding calendar year, the ALS Gold Medal is Australia’s longest running literary award. Last year’s winner was Debra Dank for We Come with This Place (Echo).

Category: Awards Local news