The 2024 Stella Prize winner was announced last Thursday, the 2nd of May, but that was the also the day my blog turned 15, and I didn’t want to flood cyberspace with too many posts. Then this weekend was the SixDegrees meme which meant another post coming at you. So, I decided to do my Stella 2024 post, this year, as a Monday Musings. It makes sense to do so, in fact, because it’s an historic win. First though, the winner, for those of you who haven’t heard yet:
Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy
Why historic? Again, some of you will already know this, but Alexis Wright, one of our leading First Nations writers, is the first writer to win the Stella twice in its 12 year history. An impressive achievement by any measure. I am embarrassed to say, however, that of the now four Stella winners I haven’t read, Wright’s two are among them. This is not because I don’t want to read them, but because they are big tomes, and my life doesn’t seem to lend itself these days to chunksters. I read and loved her multi-award winning novel Carpentaria (my post), which was big enough – at over 500 pages – but that was before blogging when time pressures felt different! Clearly, though, I should make time for this because, from what I can tell, its subject matter is something I care about and it has the wit and playfulness, passion and imagination, that I loved in Carpentaria.
Praiseworthy has already been recognised by the literary establishment. Last year it won the Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. Further, as publisher Giramondo shares, it has been shortlisted for many other awards: The Dublin Literary Award 2024; the People’s Choice Award, the Christine Stead Prize for Fiction and the Indigenous Writers Prize in the 2024 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award; The James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2024; and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance in the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards.
The chair of the judging panel said this about the book:
Praiseworthy is mighty in every conceivable way: mighty of scope, mighty of fury, mighty of craft, mighty of humour, mighty of language, mighty of heart. Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel – perhaps the great Australian novel – it is also a great Waanyi novel. 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.
Giramondo’s (above-linked) page for the book, includes excerpts from other critics and reviewers. Samuel Rutter of the New York Times Book Review describes it as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, while Jane Gleeson-White wrote in The Conversation that “Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet…a hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty”. More than one references Ulysses, such as Ruth Padel, who describes it in The Spectator as “an impassioned environmental Ulysses of the Northern Territory… Playful, formally innovative, multi-storied, allegorical, protean and dizzyingly exhilarating, it is long, lyrical and enraged”. Several, in fact, praise the language; and many comment on its satirical aspect, its lyricism, its comedy. Lynda Ng, in Meanjin, calls it:
The finest distillation yet of Wright’s themes – a bold assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty that successfully encompasses all areas of life: culture, economy, and jurisprudence.
Of course, Giramondo has selected excerpts that praise, but the sources of that praise are impressive.
There are those who think that she should/may/will be Australia’s next Nobel Laureate for Literature.
Returning to the Stella, you can read more on the Stella website, including a link to Alexis Wright’s acceptance speech, and an expressive video performance of a brief scene from the novel by Boonwurrung actor Tasma Walton.
Just to remind you, this year’s Stella judges were writer, literary critic, Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival and this year’s chair, BeeJay Silcox; Filipino-Australian poet, performer, arts producer, and advocate, Eleanor Jackson; First Nations award-winning poet and arts board member, Cheryl Leavy; novelist, occasional critic and full-time dad, Bram Presser; and writer and historian, Dr Yves Rees.
Wikipedia offers a well-presented complete list of the winners and all the short and longlisted books.
Thoughts anyone?
Whispering Gums 
Well deserved I’ve it on my tbr
Good for you Stu!
I am certainly one who thinks Wright should win the Nobel, as to will win, I don’t know enough/anything about the politics.
I follow Giramondo on FB and yesterday the cover artist said they designed that yellow swoop on the cover for The Swan Book, and turned it upside down to be a swoop of butterflies for Praiseworthy.
I was just looking at the cover yesterday, Bill and wondering what it meant so thanks for sharing that. It’s a distinctive cover.
And yes I know you are on her team for the Nobel. I read someone the other day, but can’t recollect who, who named her for it, putting her ahead of Murnane, someone else whose name I just can’t recollect (and it’s irritating me), and Coetzee, which was a bit strange since he already has one.
Murnane is definitely Nobel-worthy, but LOL lucks out on the diversity checkboxes. OTOH they gave the Nobel to Bob Dylan and he didn’t tick the diversity boxes either and he doesn’t even write literature. So who knows?
Indeed, who knows. It’s hasn’t really been about diversity in the current narrow definition I think – even recently? But I haven’t analysed the choices in detail to back that up!
I’m responding here to your comment below to keep the thread together.
In the time that I’ve been following and reviewing Nobel winners on the blog, they’ve responded to pressure to award the Nobel to women, to Annie Ernaux, Louise Glück, Olga Tokarczuk, Svetlana Alexievich, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller
from Africa: Wole Soyinka back in the 1980s, and J M Coetzee 2003) Abdulrazak Gurnah 2021.
from Asia: Mo Yan (China) Japan/Britain Kazuo Ishiguro
from Latin America: Mario Vargas Llosa
from the Middle East: Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
I have no idea if ever they’ve awarded it to anyone LGBTIQ+ but there’s certainly been an improvement in the number and frequency of women writers, and in its geographic spread. To say that it used to be Eurocentric is an understatement.
Thanks for doing what I was too lazy to do. What you have done here reflects my sense of what I thought had happened over the last decade or so. To me this is not following a “narrow” idea of identity, but just being more open to the breadth of writing out there rather than being so eurocentric as you say, and male focused. I think Nadine Gordimer and Toni Morrison are in there too? They are among the first that I remember noticing. Before them there were almost no women. There still doesn’t seem to be many people of colour?
The first woman was Selma Lagerlöf in 1909, and then there was Grazia Deledda in 1926 and the first early ones I’ve read were I’ve read were Sigrid Undset, in 1928 and Pearl Buck in 1938. Then there were two I haven’t read: Gabriela Mistral in 1945 (a poet) and then there was a very long gap till Nelly Sachs (poetry & drama) in 1966. And an even longer gap till Nadine Gordimer in 1999…
Rabindranath Tagore was the first person of colour in 1913, and then a half-century gap till Wole Soyinka in 1986, and then Toni Morrison in 1993, and then Abdulrazak Gurnah in 2021.
I think the demand for more diversity in the identity of winners doesn’t necessarily reflect an interest in literature but is more about nationalism and identity politics, but still, I’ve read a good few of the more recent winners who reflect the multicultural world we live in, and I think they’ve been very good choices.
OTOH I think that one good thing about the Eurocentric focus was that writers from ‘minor’ European countries have been recognised. US and UK authors dominate the global world of literature, and within Europe it’s French and German books that dominate the translated market. So when the Nobel recognises an author from Sweden or Iceland or Greece, those books get translated for our market and we get to read them.
Not many women or people of colour through all those years. I don’t really like the term identity politics because it can negate all the positives that are being achieved by forcing eyes to be opened to look at more possibilities and potential. Like most change it can feel overdone at times but it’ll settle down – though maybe not in our time!!
Well, I’ve read both Carpentaria (pre blog) and The Swan Book and Tracker, and I fully intended to read Praiseworthy, but I found it indigestible. And despite the accolades, I don’t feel inclined to pick it up again.
I understand that Lisa … it’s a long book to pick up when you’ve put it down for that reason. It seems to me like a book you need serious headspace for.
Yes. Maybe like Tolstoy’s Words and Peace which I tried and gave up on three times before I finally read and loved it.
I have put it – War and peace – down two or three times, each time not because I wasn’t liking it but because it just didn’t have the endurance. There are a lot of good books out there aren’t there. I often feel I could read three shorter ones to one chunkster. I need to see significant uninterrupted time in front of me I think to tackle these big books, and I just don’t see that time coming soon.
I was considering adding this one to my TBR as I read your post, but then I reached the past where it is compared to Ulysses. That’s when I mentally put it in my brain’s desktop trash can. Not only do I find Ulysses unreadable, but it’s bizarre for those reviewers to praise the author’s novel by comparing it to a book written by a white man from Europe.
I love your way of writing/thinking Melanie – “my brain’s desktop trash can”! I take your point about Ulysses being a white man from Europe but I think there are times when identity isn’t relevant? I understand they’re using it to describe her iconoclastic, innovative and passionate approach to writing. But, it would be interesting to know whether she saw it that way!
Even culturally, it seems like Joyce is so far removed from a First Nations person in Australia.
And there you have identity politics at work: dismissing the novel Ulysses, its reviewers and its author because of his skin colour, gender and geographical location.
Yes I recognised that reaction but I want to talk about the issues – look at the angles – and without labelling, because I think labels close off conversation rather than encourage it? Different generations, different experiences, etc, can result in different ways of seeing things. I would like to hear them all and tease out the nuances.
And I think there is nuance to what Melanie says here, that is worth teasing out. My first reaction was surprise, because I believe I understood what those critics meant, as I replied to Melanie, but she did make me wonder what Alexis Wright would think? Would she appreciate the comparison? Why or why not? At least one other critic/reviewer mentioned magical realism which I know Wright doesn’t like because for her there’s nothing magical about it. It’s all real.
In other words I don’t see it Melanie’s way but I want to keep the discussion channels open. Melanie and I have had some great discussions since we connected via our blogs. I so enjoy hearing her perspective on all sorts of things.
Or, or, just maybe what I’m saying is that a work by a First Nations person can be celebrated as a triumph all on its own without feeling the need to compare it to a novel by a man from a completely different culture, location, time period, and lived experience in a effort to brand the novel by the First Nations author as being good to read. Can it not be good all on its own without being compared to a book that is unlike it? I really wish you would think a bit more before you leave me comments like this, because you know I can see them, and they’re never terribly friendly or engaging.
Yes, Melanie, I think you have a point, I remember reading a discussion of what’s good and bad in a book review or criticism and one of the things this person disliked was, say, Georgette Heyer channels Jane Austen. The comparison with Ulysses isn’t quite the same as this, but it’s similar. I do think there can be value in making comparisons, all the same, but they may fall flat!
I will read this one day Sue, but I plan to read her books in chronological order. I’m also waiting for someone to do one of the Black Inc writers on writers books on her.
Yes that would be great to see.
I would like to read The Swan book next, but we’ll see!
Like Bill, I’m in the Alex Wright Nobel Prize camp, too. I think she has put Australian First Nations writing on the international map. I am yet to read anything written by her (the font size is simply too small in the print editions so I need to buy them in digital format).
And while I can understand people baulking at the Ulysses comparison because that book has a reputation (unfairly in my opinion) of being impenetrable to read, I think it’s being used to show that the book is wholly original, uses language in an inventive way and marks a shift in our understanding of how the novel works.
Yes, thanks Kimbofo. That’s essentially what I said to Melanie re the comparison. Like you I can understand it but it’s important also to stop and think whether that baulking has legs.
It was likely both the Stella Prize AND the smart Australian reading friends I know that resulted in Alexis Wright landing on my TBR in the beginning. Whatever the reason, I’m glad that I’ve read her and that I have Praiiseworthy in my stack currently!
I’m glad too Marcie… It’s so good to know that she it’s getting known.