Alexis WRIGHT wins the Miles Franklin

AUSTRALIAN novelist Alexis Wright has won the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her sprawling novel, Carpentaria (Giramondo Publishing, 2006), a complex piece of fiction which was turned down by every major publisher in Australia and beating literary heavyweight Peter Carey (Theft), a three-time Miles Franklin winner, Gail Jones (Dreams of Speaking) and Deborah Robertson (Careless). Wright, a committed activist for Aboriginal land rights, was awarded Australia’s most prestigious literary prize tonight in Sydney for her second novel, which judges said was a big novel in every sense of the word. (Her first novel, Plains of Promise, was published by the University of Queensland Press in 1997.)

Carpentaria is about a deadly fight for Aboriginal land rights and at the same time “a stunning evocation of a sublime and often overwhelming tropical world that is still inhabited by traditional spirits.”