Alexis Wright

Alexis Wright is an Aboriginal Australian novelist and essayist, a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Born in 1950, she is one of Australia's most celebrated and formally radical novelists, known for fiction that combines oral tradition, myth, and postmodern experimentation to address the survival and continuity of First Nations cultures in Australia. Her novels include Plains of Promise (1997) and Carpentaria (2006), which won the Miles Franklin Award and is considered one of the landmark works of Australian literature. Her collective biography Tracker (2017), about Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth, won the Stella Prize in 2018. Her novel Praiseworthy (2023), a vast and formally explosive work set in a fictional Aboriginal town facing climate catastrophe and political indifference, won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2024 and has been celebrated as one of the most ambitious novels of the century. Wright has been active in land rights and cultural sovereignty movements and has written extensively about the relationship between Aboriginal storytelling and the novel form. She won the Stella Prize twice, for Tracker and for Praiseworthy.