Alexis Wright wins 2018 Stella Prize for her biography of Tracker Tilmouth

Accomplished Australian author, Alexis Wright, has won the 2018 Stella Price for her book Tracker – a biography of Aboriginal leader, thinker and entrepreneur, Tracker Tilmouth. The Miles Franklin award winning author, collected the $50,000 Stella Prize at an event at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney last night.

Fiona Stager, Chair of the 2018 Stella judging panel, says of the winning book:

“This extraordinary, majestic book has been composed by Wright from interviews with family, friends, foes and Tilmouth himself. It is one man’s story told by many voices, almost operatic in scale. With a tight narrative structure, compelling real-life characters, the book sings with insight and Tracker’s characteristic humour. Wright has crafted an epic that is a truly rewarding read.”

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her books include Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in Tennant Creek, and the novels Plains of Promise, The Swan Book and Carpentaria, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Victorian and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards, and the ALS Gold Medal, and was published in the US, UK, China, Italy, France, Spain and Poland. She is currently the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne.

Of winning the 2018 Stella Prize, Alexis Wright says:

“I am totally amazed and shocked, but I deeply acknowledge the great honour that has been bestowed by the Stella Prize on my book Tracker.

I want to express my gratitude to my friend Tracker Tilmouth, the great Eastern Arrernte man of Central Australia, and visionary leader in the Aboriginal world. I thought very deeply about how to develop this book about him by using our own storytelling principle of consensus, to give everyone the opportunity to tell their part in the story. I was not even sure if it would work as the manuscript of stories grew, but I pushed on for the six years it took to create Tracker.

I worked on this book because I felt that Australia needed to hear what Tracker had to say. It is important. It involves the future of Aboriginal people and our culture.

All Australian writers and their readers should be grateful that the Stella Prize has created enormous opportunities for women writers. I thank the judges for ensuring that Tracker’s story will be heard and appreciated by many more people.”

This year’s Stella Prize judges – co-owner of award-winning bookshop Avid Reader, Fiona Stager (chair); author Julie Koh; editor and award-winning writer and poet Ellen van Neerven; writer and critic James Ley, and writer, editor and publisher Louise Swinn – selected a longlist of twelve books from more than one hundred and seventy entries, which they narrowed down to a shortlist of six:

• The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar (Wild Dingo Press)
• Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman (Hachette Australia)
• The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser (Allen & Unwin)
• An Uncertain Grace by Krissy Kneen (Text Publishing)
• The Fish Girl by Mirandi Riwoe (Seizure)
• Tracker by Alexis Wright (Giramondo)

The winner, Alexis Wright, receives $50,000 sponsored this year by the National Australia Bank. Each of the shortlistees received $3000 courtesy of the Ivy H Thomas and Arthur A Thomas Trust managed by Equity Trustees, and a three-week writing retreat supported by the Trawalla Foundation. The 2018 Stella Award Night was sponsored by the Wilson Foundation.

You can buy Tracker by Alexis Wright online at:

• Angus & Robertson Bookworld – $31.95* (paperback)
• Booktopia.com.au – $29.95* (paperback)
• Dymocks.com.au – $39.95* (paperback)
• Rakuten Kobo – $17.04* (ebook)

*All prices are quoted in Australian dollars and are subject to change by the retailer.