Alexis Wright is an author of dazzling energy, ambition and imagination.

The publication of her exhilarating 2006 novel, Carpentaria, was a major event in Australian literary history. It won the Miles Franklin Award and became a huge critical and commercial sensation.

That epic novel, and Wright’s two other novels – Plains of Promise (1997) and The Swan Book (2013) – begin in the author’s ancestral country, the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. A Waanyi woman, Wright elevates Indigenous experience, knowledge and forms of storytelling in all her work.

A long-time activist as well as a storyteller, Wright is concerned with Aboriginal resistance and achievement in her non-fiction writing. Her latest book, the critically acclaimed Tracker, is a ‘collective memoir’ about the late charismatic Arrernte elder, Leigh Bruce ‘Tracker’ Tilmouth.

In conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy, Wright talks story, legacy, legend and the life of Tracker.

Books and Ideas at Montalto series sound design and music: Jon Tjhia.