Plains of Promise: First Nations Classics

(Paperback, 3rd ed.)

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Now included in UQP's First Nations Classics series with an introduction from Mykaela Saunders, Plains of Promise is a masterful novel from the only writer to have won both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Stella Prize. In this brilliant, wide-ranging novel, Alexis Wright evokes city and outback, deepening our understanding of human ambition and failure, and making the timeless heart and soul of this country pulsate on the page. In the 1950s Gulf Country of Queensland's far North, black and white cultures collide in a thousand ways as Aboriginal spirituality clashes with the complex brutality of colonisation at St Dominic's Mission. When Ivy Koopundi and her mother arrive at the Mission, they are immediately separated and Ivy's life changes irrevocably. Years later, Mary, a young woman who is working for a city-based Aboriginal Coalition, visits the old Mission and learns of her mother's and grandmother's suffering there. Mary's return reignites community anxieties, leading the Council of Elders to again turn to their spirit world. This stunning novel, from the only writer to win both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Stella Prize, showcases Alexis Wright's distinctive and far-reaching talents.

Author Bio

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 Plains of Promise and Carpentaria as well as The Swan Book Wright has also 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). Her latest novel is Praiseworthy, which received the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction in 2023. She is the inaugural winner of the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.