Awards

• Short-listed for Miles Franklin Literary Award 2014
• Winner of Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature 2023

Overview

The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute teenager called Oblivia, the victim of gang-rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats, and thousands of black swans driven from other parts of the country, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of First Lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. The Swan Book has all the qualities which made Wright’s previous novel, Carpentaria, a prize-winning best-seller. It offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the wild energy and humour in her writing finds hope in the bleakest situations; and the remarkable combination of storytelling elements, drawn from myth and legend and fairy tale.

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9781489350411

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Author Information

Alexis Wright is a multi-award winning Indigenous Australian novelist. Jacqui Katona, a Djok woman, from the Kakadu area of the Northern Territory is an Aboriginal advocate. She has worked for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Stolen Generations Northern Territory and assisted her family to prevent uranium mining at Jabiluka, adjacent to Kakadu National Park. With Yvonne Margarula, of the Mirrar, she shares the Goldman Environmental Prize for Island Nations 1999. She is currently completing her graduate law degree at the University of Melbourne.

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