Background
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.
(IN the sparsely populated northern Queensland town of Des...)
IN the sparsely populated northern Queensland town of Desperance, battle lines have been drawn in the disputes among the powerful Phantom family of the Westend Pricklebush, Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob, and the white officials of neighboring towns. Trapped between politics and principle, past and present, the indigenous tribes fight to protect their natural resources, sacred sites, and, above all, their people. Steeped in myth and magical realism, Wright’s hypnotic storytelling exposes the heartbreaking realities of Aboriginal life. Carpentaria teems with extraordinary, larger-than-life characters who transcend their circumstances and challenge assumptions about the downtrodden "other." The novel "bursts with life" (Daily Telegraph) as Alexis Wright re-creates the land and its people with mysticism, stark reality, and pointed imagination.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439157847/?tag=2022091-20
(An inventive, cacophonous novel about an Aboriginal girl ...)
An inventive, cacophonous novel about an Aboriginal girl living in a future world turned upside down—where ancient myths exist side-by-side with present-day realities. Oblivia Ethelyne was given her name by an old woman who found her deep in the bowels of a gum tree, tattered and fragile, the victim of a brutal assault by wayward local youths. These are the years leading up to Australia’s third centenary, and the woman who finds her, Bella Donna of the Champions, is a refugee from climate change wars that devastated her country in the northern hemisphere. Bella Donna takes Oblivia to live with her on an old warship in a polluted dry swamp and there she fills Oblivia’s head with story upon story of swans. Fenced off from the rest of Australia by the Army, its traditional custodians left destitute, the swamp has become “the world’s most unknown detention camp” for Indigenous Australians. When Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia invades the swamp with his charismatic persona and the promise of salvation, Oblivia agrees to marry him, becoming First Lady, a role that has her confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. In this multilayered novel, winnter of the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal, Wright toys with the edges of the world we live in to offer us an intimate portrait of the realities facing Aboriginal people. We meet talking monkeys, genies with doctorates, spirit-guiding swans, and a whole cast of characters drawn from myth and legend and fairy tales. Through symbolism and a dazzling linguistic dexterity—the blending of words and phrases from high and low culture, from English, Aboriginal languages, French, and Latin—Wright beautifully demonstrates how the power of the human imagination can set us free.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1501124781/?tag=2022091-20
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.
Alexis Wright is a land rights activist originally from the Waanyi people in the highlands of the southern Gulf of Alexis Wright"s 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 (Magabala Books) on the introduction of alcohol restrictions in Tennant Creek and published in 1997. Carpentaria took two years to conceive and more than six years to write.
lieutenant was rejected by every major publisher in Australia before independent publisher Giramondo published it in 2006.
Wright was a 2012 attendee of the Byron Bay Writers Festival and Singapore Writers Festival. Wright is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney.
(IN the sparsely populated northern Queensland town of Des...)
(An inventive, cacophonous novel about an Aboriginal girl ...)