Introduction: Alexis Wright's Significant, Growing Oeuvre

Abstract

Introduction:Alexis Wright's Significant, Growing Oeuvre Belinda Wheeler (bio) This issue of Antipodes includes essays about several works written by the leading Waanyi author Alexis Wright (1950–). Wright's growing canon is continuing to make a major impression on both Australian literature and the global canon. Wright's novels have won numerous awards, including Australia's highest literary award, the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award. She won the award in 2006 for her breakthrough novel Carpentaria, and in 2013 her novel The Swan Book was shortlisted for the award. In 2018, her latest contribution, Tracker, a five-hundredplus-page tribute to the Indigenous Australian activist Leigh Bruce, won the Stella Prize, an award specifically for female authors that is also in honor of Stella Maria Sarah "Miles" Franklin. In addition to the accolades Wright has received for her work, her books are often published by international publishing houses (Carpentaria with Atria Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, for example) or Australian publishers with international distribution. Wright has also published in other literary genres including short stories and essays. Several of Wright's works have also been written primarily for a French audience, as was the case with Croire en l'incroyable and Le pacte du serpent arc-en ciel, the subject of several essays included here. Originally when I had proposed my follow-up to A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (2013) to my publisher, Camden House (an imprint of Boydell and Brewer), it was as a joint companion to the works of Alexis Wright and Kim Scott. These two Indigenous Australian authors were selected because of their exceptional growing oeuvre that is making a decisive impact locally, nationally, and globally. My publisher saw much promise in the collection and asked me to consider two companions: A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott and A Companion to the Works of Alexis Wright. Work on the Scott companion was seamless, and it was released in 2016. Things were moving forward with the Wright collection, but various personal and professional situations would have delayed production of the companion on Wright's work even further. Thankfully, several of the essays that were to originally appear in the Wright companion have now found a wonderful home at Antipodes.1 The four essays published in this issue are an ideal fit for Antipodes as they are written from the lens of diverse authors from different countries with either a direct or an indirect connection to Australia. Each essay also discusses one or more of Wright's most canonical works. [End Page 62] The essay by Geoff Rodoreda focuses on Alexis Wright's Grog War (1997), a critically important text in Wright's canon as it is her first nonfiction book and it details a debilitating problem—alcohol abuse—that was gripping her home country in Northern Australia.2 Like landmark anthropologist-writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, according to Rodoreda, Wright draws on "historical research, government documentation, newspaper reportage, and interviews with community members" to tell the community's story from their perspective. Rodoreda's essay eloquently argues that while Grog War is "about one community organization's resourcefulness and perseverance to overcome racism and white indifference in one remote town, it can also be read as an allegory for Indigenous campaigning across Australia in an ongoing struggle for community improvements at a local level." As Wright scholars know, Northern Australia plays a prominent role throughout much of her work. Thus, if one wishes to truly begin to understand Wright's important growing oeuvre, reading Grog War and important essays like Rodoreda's is a must. Not long after Wright completed Grog War, she embarked on a successful collaboration with Actes Sud, a French publisher. In 2000, Wright wrote a commissioned essay, Croire en l'incroyable (Believe in the unbelievable), for Actes Sud, which was translated by Sabine Porte. As of 2019, the essay has not been published in English, despite requests for to the author to allow it to be translated and republished in English. Estelle Castro-Koshy and Philippe Guerre explore Wright's essay in conversation along with her collection of short stories translated into French, Le pacte du serpent...