When you talk to people about Alexis Wright’s latest novel Praiseworthy – winner of two of Australia’s highest literary accolades, the Stella prize and the Miles Franklin, as well as the Queensland Literary award for fiction and the James Tait Black prize in the UK – their eyes inevitably widen, and a kind of gobsmacked look takes over. “Epic” is a word that comes up a lot – or just “big”. At more than 700 pages, it’s not for the fainthearted. Those who finish it struggle to articulate the experience, their eyes cast heavenwards as if searching for the answers from a greater power. They describe it as transformative, even revelatory. Miles Franklin-winning Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch says it’s a book you feel “in all your nerve endings and your blood and your soul when reading it … It’s staggering in its scope and its themes.”
Reviews have expressed similar awe: Astrid Edwards, writing for Times Literary Supplement, described it as a “mind-altering experience” that “retaught me how to read”; for Guardian Australia, Declan Fry wrote that “all life, as in Balzac, is here.” The New York Times declared it “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”. The book was also shortlisted for the prestigious Dublin literary award, nominated by librarians globally.
