Josephine Wilson

Josephine Wilson is an Australian author who won the Miles Franklin Award in 2017 for her debut novel Extinctions. The novel is a darkly comic work about two elderly neighbours in a Perth retirement estate — Tom, a South African Jewish refugee, and his Aboriginal Australian neighbour — who are thrown together by circumstances and compelled to confront their own racist assumptions and personal histories. Wilson spent many years as an academic before publishing Extinctions, which was her debut novel. She teaches creative writing at Curtin University in Perth. The novel was praised for its formal inventiveness, its black humour, and its serious engagement with Australian history and race relations. Extinctions draws on Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image and engages with mid-century modernist design as a structuring motif.