Alexis Wright

I was heartened to see that colleague, Alexis Wright, had been shortlisted for Australia’s premier literature prize, the Miles Franklin Award, for 2007 for her book Carpentaria.




I met Alexis in New Caledonia. We were invited to the inaugural writers’ festival Salon du livre de Poindimié, established by their national library in 2003. It is on such occasions that writers who are encamped together for a week, have an opportunity to discuss our work and ideas.



Carpentaria, is set where her people come from, the Gulf country in north western Queensland. It tells of the tumultuous life in the fictional town of Desperance, balanced precariously between the appalling rednecks, the Eastend and Westend mobs and the Gurfurrit mine. It’s Alexis’s black characters that light up the page, more real than those put forward by most white authors that I’ve read – there’s Fisherman Norm Phantom and his son Will, wife Angel and evangelist Mozzie Fishman. Spirits of land and sea abound in this book. The mine is an outrageous scar across the land and the Gurfurrit management think nothing of destroying locals who stand in the way of their plans.

Her first novel Plains of Promise was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, the Age Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction. It is also translated into French.