Praiseworthy (novel)

Praiseworthy (2023) is a novel by Australian writer Alexis Wright. It was originally published by Giramondo Publishing in Australia in 2023.

It was the winner of the 2024 Stella Prize and also the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards — Fiction Book Award, amongst others.

Praiseworthy has been shortlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Synopsis
The town of Praiseworthy, in Australia's north, is home to Cause Man Steel, who sees an end-of-the-world crisis looming. His solution is to round up all the donkeys in the nearby area, arguing that they will be important when civilization collapses. He and his wife, Dance, who has become fascinated by moths and butterflies, and his sons, Aboriginal Sovereignty, who wants to commit suicide, and Tommyhawk, who wants to become white, have to live under the 2008 Australian Federal Government intervention program, which attempts to regulate how Indigenous Australians act and behave.

Epigraph

 * "I am not even dust. I am a dream..." -Jorge Luis Borges

Publishing history
After its initial publication in Australia by Giramondo Publishing in 2023, the novel is due to be reprinted in February 2024 in USA by New Directions.

Critical reception
Mykaela Saunders, writing in Sydney Review of Books, noted that the novel "is classic Wright: a book made of beautiful, mutable and playful language, designed to be enjoyed."

In Australian Book Review Tony Hughes-d'Aeth called the novel a "worthy" successor to the author's previous two books, and went on: "One of the joys of reading Wright is the wry exasperation that permeates the narrator's voice. Praiseworthy 's narration is a sustained rant that calls to mind the work of Thomas Bernhard or the quiet rage of Dostoyevsky. But as with the work of these great writers, there is always a gleam in the novel’s eye that causes the story to hover between tragedy and farce. This undecidability is the symptom of the scale of the novel's address. Wright is that rare thing in Australian writing: a writer of political reality." They concluded: "Praiseworthy blew me away. If one wants to feel the grit of Indigenous sovereignty, or to see it working in its most unassimilable and joyously maddening forms, then Wright's new novel offers that possibility. It is a novel that runs rings around the mincing discourses of reconciliation. It seems to casually hold the whole universe in the teasing circularity of its incantations."

Awards

 * James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2023 winner
 * Queensland Literary Awards — Fiction Book Award, 2023, winner
 * Stella Prize, 2024
 * Miles Franklin Award, 2024, longlist
 * ALS Gold Medal, 2024, winner