Think Big; Imagine Big

“We have to think big. We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it.” – Alexis Wright

A native Australian (half of her heritage is Aborigine) Wright was born Nov. 25, 1950, and grew up in Queensland.  She's best known for winning the prestigious Miles Franklin Award for her sweeping 2006 novel Carpentaria, which tells the interconnected stories of several inhabitants – both aboriginal and white – of the fictional town of Desperance on the Gulf of Carpentaria in northwest Queensland.

 

Wright, who also is a research fellow at the University of Western Sydney, spent years conceiving and then getting the book published, despite the fact that she’d already won several literary awards for earlier writings, including her first novel Plains of Promise.   She also is noted for her nonfiction work Take Power, an anthology on the history of the land rights movement. She has written widely on indigenous rights, and lived and worked for several years in Central Australia where she organized successful Indigenous Constitutional Conventions.   
                                     Wright looks upon her work as a writer, particularly as a novelist, as a pacesetter.  “My role as a novelist is to explore ideas and imagination,” she said, “and hopefully that will inspire people from my world to continue dreaming and to believe in those dreams.”

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