Ĭritics praised the novella as a feel-good, 'joyful experience' with Jacob Aron of New Scientist saying that it left a 'warm, fuzzy feeling inside' after reading. Its 4 hour long audiobook is narrated by Emmett Grosland. The novella was published by the Tom Doherty Associates division of Macmillan Publishers and released on July 13, 2021, as a hardcover, ebook and audiobook. Also touched on are issues of therapy, satisfaction and finding a purpose.

The story also depicts humans and robots having independence from one another, while issues such as overpopulation and oil overusage taking up landscape are seen in the foreground. The setting of the story, Panga, is seen undergoing rewilding.

One day Dex, seeking a change in their routine, travels into the wild and meets a robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap and they are thrown into a road-trip with a question on their minds: 'What do people need?' Dex custom-blends tea to fit the people's needs and personalities, and they confide their misgivings to the monk. On a moon called Panga where AI and robots are a distant myth, Dex is an adventurous and friendly tea monk who travels the human-populated areas of their moon meeting villagers and townsfolk. By the time of the first novella's release in 2021, the 36-year-old Chambers, living in northern California, had won the Hugo Award for Best Series for the Wayfarers series whose fourth novel, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, had been published earlier that year. Clarke Award and she would continue writing that series as she worked on these new solarpunk novellas. Chambers's debut novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014), and its sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit (2016), in the Wayfarers series, had both been nominated for the Arthur C. In 2018, for its Tor.com Publishing imprint, Tor Books commissioned science fiction author Becky Chambers to write a two-book novella series within the emerging solarpunk genre. It is the first book in the Monk & Robot duology, followed by A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, which was released on July 12, 2022. A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a 2021 solarpunk novella written by American author Becky Chambers and was published by Tor.com on July 13, 2021.

A psalm for the wild build