The Swan Book
Originally published in 2014, Alexis Wright’s classic novel The Swan Book is being rereleased in a new edition designed by Jenny Grigg.
Accompanies the April release of Praiseworthy, Wright’s first work of fiction since 2014.
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. It follows the life of a mute young woman 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, 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 offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the energy and humour in her writing, which draws freely on myth and legend, finds hope in the bleakest situations.
The Swan Book was the winner of the ALS Gold Medal and the Kate Challis RAKA Award, and shortlisted for Miles Franklin Literary Award, Stella Prize, NSW Premier’s and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
‘This is not myth as Western culture understands it: not an imagined dimension, but a literal if incorporeal one that bisects and animates the physical world; it makes for marvellous theatre.’ — Elizabeth Lowry, London Review of Books
‘This is a novel written out of the very thing it describes: sovereignty, the sheer taken-for-granted fact of it…The Swan Book is about the ethics of hope in our post-apocalyptic world.’ — Sydney Morning Herald
Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the prize-winning novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Wright has published three works of non-fiction: Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, an award-winning collective memoir of Aboriginal leader, Tracker Tilmouth. Her books have been published widely overseas, including in China, the US, the UK, Italy, France and Poland. She holds the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne. Wright is the only author to win both the Miles Franklin Award (in 2007 for Carpentaria) and the Stella Prize (in 2018 for Tracker). Alexis Wright’s fourth novel, Praiseworthy, will be published in early 2023.
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