The 73-year-old has won the $60,000 prize for Australian female and non-binary writers for her ‘genre-bending’ 736-page novel
Alexis Wright has made history by becoming the first person to win the Stella prize for literature twice.
. Wright worked on Tracker and Praiseworthy simultaneously, with the latter 736-page novel taking almost a decade to complete.“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.
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.
“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.”
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