Ruth Padel

From the Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz: Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, reviewed

Everything blends into everything else as an Aboriginal knight errant sets out on a quest to save his scorched native bushlands

Around Ormiston Pound in Northern Territory, Australia [Getty Images]

Among many other prizes for her stunningly original work, Alexis Wright has won Australia’s greatest literary honour, the Miles Franklin Award, for a novel of the highest literary merit representing Australian life. It is ironic, but sadly apt, that her epic Praiseworthy should be published in the year that Australians, offered a chance to give greater political rights to their indigenous peoples, have voted not to.

Everything blends together: dream and reality, donkeys and butterflies, the Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz

Wright is an Aboriginal activist as well as a writer.

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