Alexis Wright

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.

When the Northern Territory Intervention proposed by the Howard Government in mid-2007 was introduced, Wright delivered of 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 Plains of Promise published in 1997 was nominated for several literary awards and has been reprinted several times by University of Queensland Press.

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

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.

Wright was a 2012 attendee of the Byron Bay Writers Festival and Singapore Writers Festival.

Wright was on the program for 4 events at the 2017 Brisbane Writers Festival in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Academic career

Wright is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney.