On the day she decided she had finally finished Praiseworthy, after almost a decade of writing and rewriting until she was happy with every one of its 700-odd pages, Alexis Wright went out to her garden in Melbourne’s north-east, and started furiously weeding. “It was like another edit!” she laughs. “And that garden was weeded within an inch of its life.”
Wright, an Indigenous Australian novelist – one of the Waanyi people from the Gulf of Carpentaria – has written four novels since 1997. Her most recent, Praiseworthy, described by the New York Times as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, was an exhilarating, exhausting labour. “It took me a while to come down from it,” the 74-year-old says. “I didn’t realise how much emotional, physical energy I was putting into it.”
