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. 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, 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 novelPlains of Promise, published in 1997, was nominated for several literary awards and has been reprinted several times by University of Queensland Press. 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 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, 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. Wright was a 2012 attendee of the Byron Bay Writers Festival and Singapore Writers Festival. 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 and complicated, Tracker won the 2018 Stella Prize. 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." She was awarded the 2018 Magarey Medal for Biography for Tracker. Tracker also won the 2018 University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award at the Queensland Literary Awards. and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Douglas Stewart Prize for No-Fiction 2019. Wright was on the program for four events at the 2017 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. In 2018, Wright conducted another storytelling collaboration, this time with the Gangalidda leader and activist Clarence Walden in Doomadgee, Northern Queensland. Her work with Walden led to two feature documentaries, Nothing but the Truth, a radio feature that broadcast on the Awaye! program on ABC Radio National in June 2019, and Straight from the Heart, a screen documentary that premiered at World Literature and the Global South in August 2019.
Academic career
Wright is a Distinguished Research Fellow at Western Sydney University. Wright is currently a member of the Australian Research Council research project . Building on her success with Tracker, her theme for the project focuses on forms of Aboriginal oral storytelling. In 2017, Wright was named the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne.
