Alexis Wright

Alexis Wright (born 25 November 1950)^[2] is an Indigenous Australian writer best known for winning the Miles Franklin Award for her 2006 novel Carpentaria^[3] and the 2018 Stella Prize for her "collective memoir" of Leigh Bruce "Tracker" Tilmouth.^[4]

Origin and activism

Alexis Wright is a land rights activist originally from the Waanyi people in the highlands of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Wright's father, a white cattleman, died when she was five years old and she grew up in Cloncurry, Queensland, with her mother and grandmother.^[5]

When the Northern Territory Intervention proposed by the Howard Government in mid-2007 was introduced, Wright delivered a high-profile 10,000-word speech, sponsored by International PEN,^[6] in which her identification of an ethos of national fear in Australia came to be portrayed in the national media as a characterisation of the feelings of Indigenous peoples associated with the Intervention.

Literary career

Alexis Wright's first book, the novel Plains of Promise, published in 1997, was nominated for several literary awards and has been reprinted several times by University of Queensland Press.^[7]

Wright is also the author of non-fiction works: Take Power, on the history of the land rights movement, was published in 1998, and Grog War (Magabala Books) on the introduction of alcohol restrictions in Tennant Creek, published in 1997.

Her second novel, Carpentaria, took two years to conceive and more than six years to write. It was rejected by every major publisher in Australia before independent publisher Giramondo published it in 2006. Since then it has won the Miles Franklin Award in June 2007 (ahead of a shortlist including Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story), the 2007 Fiction Book award in the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, the 2007 ALS Gold Medal and the 2007 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction.^[3][8][9]

Wright was a 2012 attendee of the Byron Bay Writers Festival^[10] and Singapore Writers Festival.^[11]

Wright's most recent book, Tracker, her tribute to the central Australian economist Tracker Tilmouth, was published by Giramondo in 2017. A biographical work variously characterized as unconventional^[12] and complicated,^[13] Tracker won the 2018 Stella Prize.^[14] In the words of Ben Etherington: "It is a work, epic in scope and size, that will ensure that a legend of Central Australian politics is preserved in myth."^[15] She was awarded the 2018 Magarey Medal for Biography for Tracker.^[16]

Wright was on the program for four events at the 2017 Brisbane Writers Festival in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.^[17]

Academic career

Wright is a Distinguished Research Fellow at Western Sydney University.^[18]

Wright is currently a member of the Australian Research Council research project "Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature".^[19] Building on her success with Tracker, her theme for the project focuses on forms of Aboriginal oral storytelling.^[20]

In 2017, Wright was named the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne^[21].

Bibliography

Novels

• Plains of Promise (University of Queensland Press, 1997). Reprint 2000, ISBN 978-0702229176
• Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2006)
• The Swan Book (Sydney: Giramondo, 2013)

Short stories

• Le pacte du serpent arc-en-ciel. [The Serpent’s Covenant] (Acte Sud, 2002). ISBN 978-2742740956

Non-fiction

• Grog War (Magabala, 1997). ISBN 1-875641-31-9. Review
• Croire en l'incroyable. [Believing the Unbelievable] (Actes Sud, 2000). ISBN 978-2742731206
• Tracker (Sydney: Giramondo, 2017). ISBN 978-1925336337

Editor

• Take Power, Like This Old Man Here: An anthology of writings celebrating twenty years of land rights in Central Australia, 1977–1997 (IAD, 1998). ISBN 1-86465-005-2

References

External links

• "Breaking Taboos". Essay, Australian Humanities Review.
• Jane Perlez, "Aboriginal Lit", The New York Times, 18 November 2007.
• Stephen Moss, "Dream warrior", The Guardian, 15 April 2008.
• "Alexis Wright wins Miles Franklin Award", The Age, 21 June 2007.