Wright honoured for Lifetime Achievement in Literature
Alexis Wright has won the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, which ‘acknowledges the achievements of eminent literary writers over the age of 60 who have made an outstanding and lifelong contribution to Australian literature’.
Creative Australia said Wright is ‘an author of ground-breaking works across a number of literary genres. She is a highly decorated and awarded author who writes extraordinarily important work that sits in your consciousness. Her novels interpret the past, present, and future tense and challenge the readers’ comprehension. She has changed how we think about the meaning of storytelling and time.’
Wright is the 2007 Miles Franklin Award winner for the novel Carpentaria (Giramondo), the 2018 Stella Prize winner for the collective memoir Tracker (Giramondo) and most recently she won a Queensland Literary Award for Praiseworthy (Giramondo) in the Fiction Book Award category.
A member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, Wright has published three works of nonfiction: Take Power (IAD Press), an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War (Magabala), a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, a collective memoir of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth. Besides the novels Carpentaria and Praiseworthy, she has also written The Swan Book (Giramondo). Her books have been published overseas—in China, the US, the UK, Italy, France and Poland. She held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne between 2017 and 2022.
Wright said, ‘I feel deeply honoured and really humbled to receive this award. It’s a lifetime achievement in literature. I am deeply humbled by something like this, but I also want to say I’m not finished yet. I’ve got a lot more writing to come.’
First initiated in 1981 and previously known as the Australia Council Awards, the Creative Australia Awards recognise the contribution of outstanding artists to their art forms and to the cultural life of the nation. The recipients are awarded for excellence in the fields of music, literature, community arts and cultural development, emerging and experimental art, visual arts, theatre, and dance. See the list of winners in other arts sectors here.
The 2023 recipients will be celebrated in a series of short-form videos on ABC TV, sharing a profile of each recipient and their practice. A video for Wright can be viewed here.
Last year’s Lifetime Achievement in Literature award was presented to Robert Dessaix.
Category: Awards Local news
