September 04, 2007
Miles-Franklin winner scores another accolade
RMIT University student Alexis Wright has won a Victorian Premier's Literary Award for her second novel,
Carpentaria.
Meanwhile in breaking news, Ms Wright has won the Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.
The judges of the Queensland competition said Carpentaria was “a major achievement, a tour de force of operatic, at times surreal, storytelling”.
“Not since Xavier Herbert's Capricornia has there been a book like this, one that can truly claim to capture the soul of Australia's north,” they said.
Miles Franklin Award-winner and former RMIT University student Alexis Wright has won a Victorian Premier's Literary Award for her second novel, Carpentaria.
The 2007 winners were announced yesterday by the Victorian Premier, John Brumby.
Ms Wright was awarded the $30,000 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction.
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards were established in 1985, to mark the centenary of the births of Vance and Nettie Palmer — distinguished writers and critics who made significant contributions to Victorian and Australian literary culture.
The awards promote and raise the profile of contemporary creative writing and Australia's publishing industry.
The competition’s judges said Carpentaria demonstrated that Wright was an inventive writer.
The judges added that Carpentaria was “almost audacious in its scope and ambition … Wright has created a strong, confident and vivid voice with a healthy dose of sly humour”.
Ms Wright, who studied Professional and Creative Writing at RMIT, is an activist for Aboriginal land rights.
She is the 2007 winner of Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, the 2007 recipient of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the 2007 winner of the Australian Book Industry Award for Literary Fiction. These accolades were for also Carpentaria.
Ms Wright says the world that she created in Carpentaria is so far removed from the realm of experience of non-Indigenous Australians that it can seem strange and almost unbelievable.
“The response to this novel has made me realise how disconnected people are from Indigenous culture,” Ms Wright said.
Carpentaria is told from the voice of an Aboriginal elder in the fictitious town of Desperence. It explores the lives of the Picklebush people and their battles with another mob, white officials and a neighbouring mine.
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