Alexis Wright continues her dream run with the acclaimed novel Praiseworthy, one of six books announced as the shortlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin literary award, Australia’s highest literary honour.
Announced on Tuesday, the other five books up for the $60,000 prize are Gregory Day’s The Bell of the World, André Dao’s Anam, Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, Jen Craig’s Wall and Hossein Asgari’s Only Sound Remains.
In May Wright became the first person to win the $60,000 Stella prize for literature twice.
Two weeks later the 73-year-old Waanyi writer won a James Tait Black memorial prize, the UK’s oldest prize for literature, with University of Edinburgh judges praising the work as “a kaleidoscopic and brilliantly conceived novel that interweaves matters of climate and Indigenous justice in prose”.
Last September Praiseworthy won the University of Queensland fiction book award, and the work has also been shortlisted for the Queensland premier’s award for a work of state significance, the winner to be announced in August.
Miles Franklin judges said the 736-page epic novel about a remote Indigenous community facing impending environmental collapse was expansive in every way.
“The novel is at once an epic of classical proportions and a wild comedic romp,” the judges said.
“A stylistic tour de force, its tone capable of switching in an instant between the lyrical and the wickedly satirical, Praiseworthy triumphantly assesses its themes against the ultimate measures: the timelessness of Country and the indomitable spirit of Aboriginal sovereignty.”
The Victorian writer Gregory Day is shortlisted for the second time with his novel The Bell of the World, set in early 20th-century regional Victoria. His earlier work A Sand Archive was shortlisted in 2019 and the writer received the prestigious Patrick White award for his ongoing body of work the following year.
The judges said Day possessed a dazzling mastery of words. Their statement praised how he “repackages the past for contemporary purposes” and urges us to “grasp our embedded selves within the rich interconnectedness of the world”.
Jen Craig’s third novel, Wall, also made it on to the list. The New South Wales writer, whose other job is a trauma-informed psychotherapist, has produced a narrative monologue, with a woman seeking to create an artwork from the detritus in her dead father’s house.
“Wall is a brilliant novel full of pathos, humour and deep introspection that asks us to consider how we make meaning from life’s material accretions, formative experiences, stray memories and emotional baggage,” the judges said.
Three first-time novelists made it on the shortlist. Hospital, the debut from the Bangladesh-born Australian writer Sanya Rushdi, was written in the author’s mother tongue and translated by Arunava Sinha.
Judges praised Hospital, set in a mental illness facility, as a “fictional flourish of poetic utterance that is, in turns, affecting and absorbing in its disquisition upon the nature of psychosis”.
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The other two first-time novelists are Hossein Asgari – whose book Only Sound Remains judges described as a “unique dimension of the modern Australian story” – and the lauded André Dao, nominated for Anam, a work which three years earlier won the Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript.
The book follows a suburban Melbourne man’s quest to find out his family history, which takes him to France, England and Vietnam – a chronicle, the judges said, that “sweeps the world-in-making for our times, redraws maps and reinvents what fiction can do”.
Dao also won the Pascall prize for cultural criticism at the 2024 mid-year Walkley awards.
All Miles Franklin finalists receive $5,000, with the winner, to be announced on 1 August, receiving $60,000.
The Miles Franklin judges said the six books on the shortlist held a mirror to the expressions and excitements of contemporary Australian writing.
“They reveal hidden genealogies of arrival and take us on journeys of discoveries to places left behind, both physical and philosophical, explore the innermost workings of our psyche, and interrogate accepted mores of society.
“There is an emphasis on listening, and the way we, the reading public, are called upon to ethically engage with the sounds and syllables of our times. Each of these novels crafts its own distinct world and demands our utmost attention.”
The 2024 Miles Franklin shortlist
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Only Sound Remains by Hossein Asgari (Puncher & Wattmann)
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Wall by Jen Craig (Puncher & Wattmann)
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Anam by André Dao (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
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The Bell of the World by Gregory Day (Transit Lounge)
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Hospital by Sanya Rushdi (Giramondo Publishing)
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Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (Giramondo Publishing)