Stella prize winner Alexis Wright has been nominated for the $60,000 award a second time, for her 700-page “canon-crushing” novel Praiseworthy.
The Waanyi writer won the Stella prize, intended to reward the work of Australian women and non-binary authors, in 2018 for her biography Tracker.
The 73-year-old is nominated this year for her fourth novel Praiseworthy, named for the small outback town in which it is set and where a mysterious haze descends. Suspecting climate change, local resident Cause Man Steel embarks on a mission to create an Aboriginal-owned carbon neutral transport industry using feral donkeys – one of many threads in a sprawling novel the Guardian described as “linguistically commodious [and] panoramically plotted”.
In a joint statement, the Stella judges described Praiseworthy as “a genre-defiant epic” and “a canon-crushing Australian novel for the ages”.
“Wright’s use of language and imagery is poetic and expansive, creating an immersive blak multiverse. Readers will be buoyed up by Praiseworthy’s aesthetic and technical quality; and winded by the tempestuous pace of Wright’s political satire,” they added.
Praiseworthy won the fiction category at the Queensland Premier’s award last year. It is also up for the UK’s oldest literary awards, the James Tait Black prize, and is shortlisted for the lucrative Dublin literary award, worth €100,000 (A$165,468.27) and voted on by librarians around the world.
Wright is one of only two authors to win both the Stella prize and the Miles Franklin award, along with Evie Wyld. Wright won the Miles Franklin in 2007 for her second novel Carpentaria, which was rejected by every major publisher in Australia before independent publisher Giramondo picked it up.
Joining Wright on the six-book Stella shortlist, whittled down from 227 entries, are three debuts: Sanya Rushdi for Hospital, a “deeply experimental” autofiction inspired by Rushdi’s experience with psychosis; Katia Ariel for The Swift Dark Tide, a memoir charting her romantic relationship with a woman while married to a man; and Hayley Singer for Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead, about the modern meat industry.
Novelist Emily O’Grady is nominated for Feast, a novel about family drama centred around the titular party, while Katherine Brabon is nominated for Body Friend, a novel about chronic pain.
“None of the books on this shortlist tell readers what to think,” the chair of Stella judges Beejay Silcox, said. “They do not hector, lecture or preach. Rather, they open spaces for doubt and self-examination, disagreement and camaraderie, rage, absurdity and exultation for the grotesque and the gorgeous. They invite us in. And they trust us to make up our own minds. This is the quality that distinguished them in the judging room: their mighty generosity.”
Previous winners of the Stella include Sarah Holland-Batt and Charlotte Wood. The 2024 winner will be announced on 2 May.
The 2024 Stella Prize shortlist
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (Giramondo Publishing)
Feast by Emily O’Grady (Allen & Unwin)
Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead by Hayley Singer (Upswell Publishing)
Body Friend by Katherine Brabon (Ultimo Press)
The Swift Dark Tide by Katia Ariel (Gazebo Books)
Hospital by Sanya Rushdi (Giramondo Publishing)
