Photo: Abigail Varney

Alexis Wright

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. She is the author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria, The Swan Book, and, most recently, Praiseworthy. Her works of non-fiction include Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, the award-winning collective memoir of Aboriginal leader, Tracker Tilmouth.

Wright’s books have been published widely overseas, including in China, the US, the UK, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Poland. She has won numerous literary awards, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Carpentaria and Praiseworthy, as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Queensland Literary Award for Praiseworthy, which was also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Wright is the first author to win the Stella Prize twice (for Tracker and Praiseworthy), and Praiseworthy is the only book to have received both the Stella and the Miles Franklin awards. Wright held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne, and has received honorary titles at universities including the University of Melbourne, Western Sydney University and the University of Queensland. She is the inaugural winner of the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, the winner of the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature, and is shortlisted in the Legacy category for the 2025 Asia Pacific Arts Awards.

Titles

Fiction

352 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published May 2023
ISBN 9781922725431

Originally published in 2013, Alexis Wright’s classic novel is set in the future, with Aboriginal people still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. The book accompanies the April 2023 release of Praiseworthy, and the simultaneous rerelease of Carpentaria.

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Fiction

528 pages
Paperback, 19.7 x 13 cm
Published May 2023
ISBN 9781922725400

The new edition of Alexis Wright’s 2006 classic Carpentaria, an epic of the Gulf country of north-western Queensland. Winner of multiple literary awards, including the Miles Franklin, the novel teems with extraordinary characters – from the outcast saviour Elias Smith, to the fish-embalming king of time Norman Phantom – and is told in a form of storytelling both operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce.

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Fiction

736 pages
Hardcover, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published April 2023
ISBN 9781922725745

The collector’s hardcover edition of Praiseworthy, the winner of the 2024 Stella Prize. The novel is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned.

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Fiction

736 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published April 2023
ISBN 9781922725325

Winner of six major literary awards, including the Miles Franklin and Stella Prize, Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. Her first novel since The Swan Book and Carpentaria, it is a work which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.

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Non-fiction

640 pages
Paperback, 23.5 x 15.3 cm
Published November 2017
ISBN 9781925336337

Alexis Wright returns to non-fiction in her new book, a collective memoir of the charismatic Aboriginal leader, political thinker and entrepreneur Tracker Tilmouth, who died in Darwin in 2015. Taken from his family as a child and brought up in a mission, Tilmouth worked tirelessly for Aboriginal self-determination, creating opportunities for land use and economic development in his many roles, including Director of the Central Land Council of the Northern Territory. He was a visionary, a projector of ideas, renowned for his irreverent humour and his anecdotes. Composed by Wright from interviews with Tracker Tilmouth, and with his family, friends and colleagues, this memoir weaves stories together in a book that is a tribute to the role played by storytelling in contemporary Aboriginal life.

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Fiction

352 pages

Published August 2013
ISBN 9781922146830

The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginal people still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute young woman called Oblivia, the victim of gang rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats, and thousands of black swans, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of First Lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. The Swan Book offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the energy and humour in her writing, which draws freely on myth and legend, finds hope in the bleakest situations.

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Fiction

520 pages

Published August 2006
ISBN 9781920882310

Carpentaria is an epic of the Gulf country of north-western Queensland. Its portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob 2007 on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce.

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