Alexis Wright

Who is Alexis Wright?

Alexis Wright is an Indigenous Australian writer best known for winning the Miles Franklin Award for her 2006 novel Carpentaria.

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. Her 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 on the introduction of alcohol restrictions in Tennant Creek 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, 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.