Alexis Wright

Australian · born 1950

Born on November 25, 1950, in Cloncurry, in the Gulf Country of northwest Queensland, Alexis Wright is a woman of the Waanyi nation, whose traditional country lies in the region's southern highlands. Her father, a white cattleman, died when she was five, and she was raised in Cloncurry by her mother and grandmother. She studied at RMIT University, then spent the 1970s, 80s, and 90s working across Aboriginal organizations in Queensland, the Northern Territory, and central Australia: as a researcher and planner for the 1993 Northern Territory Aboriginal Constitutional Convention in Tennant Creek and the 1998 Kalkaringi Convention, and later as a manager on Indigenous health and community initiatives. Out of that activism came her first books: the novel Plains of Promise (1997), and two works of nonfiction, Grog War (1997), on alcohol restrictions in Tennant Creek, and the land rights history Take Power (1998). Her second novel, Carpentaria, took two years to conceive and more than six to write, and was turned down by every major Australian publisher before the small press Giramondo took it on in 2006; it won the Miles Franklin Award the following year. The Swan Book followed in 2013. In 2017, the year she was named the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne, she published Tracker, an unconventional collective biography of the Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth, which won the Stella Prize in 2018. Her fourth novel, Praiseworthy, appeared in 2023 and in 2024 swept both the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Award, the first time any writer had won both in the same year, and earned her a third ALS Gold Medal, a distinction shared only with Patrick White and David Malouf. She continues to write and holds a position as a Distinguished Research Fellow at Western Sydney University.