Alexis Wright wins the inaugural Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature

The acclaimed Australian author Alexis Wright has won the inaugural Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Write Creative Australia: ‘Alexis [Wright] is an author of ground-breaking works across a number of literary genres. She is a highly decorated and awarded author who writes extraordinarily important work that sits in your consciousness. Her novels interpret the past, present, and future tense and challenge the readers’ comprehension. She has changed how we think about the meaning of storytelling and time.’

Wright’s award-winning works include the novels Praiseworthy, Carpentaria and The Swan Book, and the collective memoir Tracker. Praiseworthy, her most recent book, won the 2023 University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, with the judges describing it as a ‘simply astonishing’ novel that combines ‘farce, satire, tragedy, the colloquial, myth, pun, repetition, elegy, and the epic’.

‘I feel deeply honoured and really humbled to receive this award,’ Wright told ABC Arts of her Lifetime Achievement. ‘But I also want to say, I’m not finished yet. I’ve got a lot more writing to come.’

Watch the full ABC Arts video profile of Alexis Wright on YouTube.