Alexis Wright: The Swan Book

When Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin, it was the first time an Aboriginal writer was awarded our most prestigious national literary prize outright. It went on to become a worldwide bestseller.

The New York Times praised the novel’s ‘magisterial yet colloquial voice, which transformed the oral tradition of the country’s indigenous people into a swirling narrative spiked with burlesque humour’.

The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginal people still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change.

Alexis Wright combines energy and humour, myth, legend and fairytale – and finds hope in the bleakest of situations.