On Thursday the 2nd of May, the 2024 Stella Prize Winner was announced!
All of us at QBD Books would like to extend a huge congratulations to Alexis Wright and Giramondo Publishing Company for winning the 2024 Stella Prize with her magnificent novel “Praiseworthy”.
“Stella” is a voice for gender equality and cultural change in Australian literature. This year, many inspiring and impactful pieces of literature have been selected for the 2024 prize.
Stella’s leading purpose since its founding in 2012, has been to support and promote books written by Australian women and non-binary writers and therefore, creating a more vibrant and diverse national culture.
Keep reading to dive into the synopsis of “Praiseworthy”!
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people.
His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide.
The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel that pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
This information was provided by Giramondo Publishing.
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 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.
This information was provided by Giramondo Publishing.
For more information on the Stella prize, you can visit their website here.
