Praiseworthy

Judges' comments

A man called Planet travels the country collecting donkeys for his climate-proof transportation empire. His wife thinks he’s mad, the mayor thinks he’s evil. Meanwhile, his two sons are lost in worlds of their own: the eldest, Aboriginal Sovereignty, wants to kill himself, the youngest, Tommyhawk, is hoping the blonde-haired Minister for Aboriginal affairs will come and adopt him.

But to say that Praiseworthy tells the story of these people would be an injustice. What it does is transfigure our very relationship to time and language. The narrative moves like a tornado, continually circling back on itself, picking up everything in its path, and embodying, within each extraordinary sentence, the coexistence of multiple times and places — the simultaneous realities of ants and ancestral beings, of now and all time. Torrential and hilarious, outraged and fantastical, Praiseworthy is a wildly ambitious work of fiction.