Alexis Wright has made history by becoming the first person to win the Stella prize for literature twice.
On Thursday night, the 73-year-old Waanyi writer collected the $60,000 prize, awarded to outstanding literature by Australian women and non-binary authors, for her fourth novel, Praiseworthy, a book of epic scale praised by the judges as “genre-bending” and “canon-breaking”.
Wright also won the Stella in 2018 for Tracker, her nonfiction collective memoir on the Indigenous leader and activist Tracker Tilmouth. Wright worked on Tracker and Praiseworthy simultaneously, with the latter 736-page novel taking almost a decade to complete.
Wright said that Praiseworthy was a product of its time.
“We need works of scale in literature at the moment, because of the urgency of what’s happening,” she said, referring to the novel’s exploration of the climate crisis and how it affects the “tumbledown life of poverty” within the fictional and former prize-winning tidy town of Praiseworthy, imagined in Australia’s northern region of Carpentaria.
“We need to think deeply about these issues, and we can’t sit around hoping that everything’s going to be OK,” she said. “My thinking in developing this book is that a lot of people keep telling Aboriginal [people] that we must have hope. But I don’t think it’s hope that’s going to get us very far.
“When you look back at our survival here, as the oldest living culture, I don’t think our people got through all those thousands of years by sitting around with hope. There is a very strong desire to survive and to take our culture into the future.”
Praiseworthy’s central protagonist, Cause Man Steel, is an enterprising local who dreams of becoming Australia’s first Indigenous billionaire. After an ominous haze descends on the town, Cause envisions a post-fossil fuel world where alternative forms of transportation will be needed to move Australians across the enormous continent. He dreams of harnessing an element of colonisation’s detritus – the 5 million feral donkeys in remote Australia – in readiness for a carbon-neutral future.
Meanwhile, his eight-year-old son, Tommyhawk, is immersed in the internet, becoming increasingly paranoid for his safety as he consumes media reports about child sexual predation in remote communities such as his.
It is Wright’s personal confrontation to the Howard government’s 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response, a contentious range of policies also known as “the intervention”. Wright calls it “a backward step” and a “tragedy”, adding that with global warming affecting remote communities surviving in some of the world’s hottest and driest environments, “we’ve got a much harder job now … and we still don’t have much control over what happens here”.
The Stella prize judges praised Wright’s voice in Praiseworthy as “operatic” in its intensity.
“Wright’s use of language and imagery is poetic and expansive, creating an immersive blak multiverse,” the judges’ statement said. “Readers will be buoyed by Praiseworthy’s aesthetic and technical quality, and winded by the tempestuous pace of Wright’s political satire.”
Reviewed by the New York Times in February, Praiseworthy was hailed as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, an appraisal the Stella chair of judges, Beejay Silcox, concurs with.
“Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel – perhaps the great Australian novel – it is also a great Waanyi novel,” Silcox said in her statement.
“And it is written in the wild hope that, one day, all Australian readers might understand just what that means. I do not understand. Not yet. But I can feel history calling to me in these pages. Calling to all of us. Imagine if we listened.”
In September, Praiseworthy won the University of Queensland fiction book award. It has also been shortlisted for the Queensland premier’s award for a work of state significance, the prestigious €100,000 International Dublin literary award, and the James Tait Black memorial prize, the UK’s oldest prize for literature.
Wright said a lifetime of studying literature from across the world enabled her to understand how she “might write the book that I wanted to write”; a book incorporating 60,000 years of storytelling and an unswerving scrutiny of contemporary reality; a book whose “vision is dark, humour tar-black, narration irrepressible, language roiling and rococo”, according to Guardian critic Declan Fry.
“It has an Aboriginal consciousness in it but it has a worldwide literary consciousness,” Wright said.
“Praiseworthy’s been developed through really deep thought and hard work over a long period of time, with many, many false starts and reworking and reworking and until I’m absolutely sure that every page, every part of that book stands up and won’t fall over.
“And it’s what I’ve hoped to achieve … to broaden the literary landscape here, to produce a work that’s right for our times here in this country and right for the times across the world.”
