Miles Franklin Award Winner 2024

The winner of the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's most prestigious literary award, was announced on 1 August 2024. This year the award and its $60,000 prize went to Alexis Wright for her novel, Praiseworthy.

Praiseworthy is the name of a fictional town in northern Australia, a remote Aboriginal community. Praiseworthy is covered in a red haze which is stifling the area. A local man, Cause Man Steel, has a plan to help his people by creating an Aboriginal-owned carbon neutral transport company using feral donkeys. 

The judges said "Wright's literary technique is a superb mash-up of different languages, ancient and modern, and displays an exceptional mastery of craft. The novel is imbued with astonishing emotional range, deploying Wright's signature humour despite its powerful sense of the tragic. Through its sheer ambition, astringency and audacity, Praiseworthy redraws the map of Australian literature and expands the possibilities of fiction.”

Author Alexis Wright is a Waanyi author best known for her novel Caprentaria which won the Miles Franklin in 2007. 

I have not read Praiseworthy, but I am intrigued. It won the Stella Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.