Alexis Wright: Writing from an unshakeable Waanyi worldview.

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation, from the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Born in Cloncurry in 1950, she grew up to become not just one of Australia's finest writers, but arguably one of the most important literary voices this continent has ever produced. And that's not us being generous.

Before the novels, there was the activism. Wright worked for decades across Aboriginal organisations and campaigns...on land rights, on mining, on community. That deep, on-the-ground work runs right through everything she writes. She's never been a writer sitting apart from the struggle. She's been in it.

Then came the books that changed Australian literature.

In 2006 she published 'Carpentaria', an epic, sprawling, operatic novel set in the Gulf country. It's a story told the Waanyi way, blending myth, humour, politics and the land itself into something completely unlike anything in the Australian canon. It won the 2007 Miles Franklin Award, the country's most prestigious literary prize along with a swag of others. The New York Times later called it the most accomplished Australian novel of this century.

She followed it with The Swan Book in 2013 and Tracker in 2017, a remarkable collective memoir of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth, which won her the Stella Prize.

And then, in 2024 she made history.

Her monumental novel 'Praiseworthy', a fierce, funny, genre-defying epic about climate, Country and colonisation, won her a second Miles Franklin Award and a second Stella Prize. In doing so, she became the first author ever to win both of Australia's most prestigious prizes for the very same book. She's also the only author to have won each of those two awards twice.

Her books are now read all over the world — translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch and more. A Waanyi woman from the Gulf, telling stories rooted in this Country, being read in living rooms on the other side of the world.

Alexis Wright didn't succeed by writing to fit someone else's idea of what a novel should be. She writes from an unshakeable Waanyi worldview — her own language, her own rhythms, her own way of holding time and story and land together. She proved you don't have to leave who you are at the door to be recognised as one of the greats. Being First Nations isn't something to write around. It's the very source of the power.