Wright awarded 2024 Miles Franklin for ‘Praiseworthy’, becomes two-time winner
Alexis Wright has won the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award, worth $60,000, for her novel Praiseworthy (Giramondo).
Wright previously won the award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria (Giramondo), and now joins authors Michelle de Kretser, Kim Scott, Thomas Keneally and Patrick White as a two-time Miles Franklin winner.
Said Wright: ‘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.’
Praiseworthy was chosen from a shortlist of six by the judges: State Library of NSW Mitchell librarian Richard Neville (chair); literary scholar Jumana Bayeh; literary scholar and translator Mridula Nath Chakraborty; book critic James Ley; and author and literary scholar Hsu-Ming Teo.
The judges called Praiseworthy ‘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,’ said the judges. ‘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.’
Praiseworthy has previously won the Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal, the Stella Prize, the Fiction Book Award at Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and the James Tait Black Prize.
Established through the will of Miles Franklin, the Miles Franklin Literary Award recognises a novel of the highest literary merit that presents ‘Australian life in any of its phases’. The 2024 award was presented in Sydney on Thursday 1 August.
The winner of last year’s award was Shankari Chandran for her novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (Ultimo).
Picture credit: Darren James.
Category: Awards Local news
