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 young woman called
Oblivia 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 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.
Alexis Wright is
a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of
Carpentaria and a current resident of Eltham, Victoria. Her books include Grog
War, a study of alcohol abuse in Tennant Creek, and the novels Plains of
Promise, and Carpentaria, which won the Miles Franklin
Literary Award, the Victorian and Queensland Premiers’ Awards and the ALS Gold
Medal, and was published in the US, UK, China, Italy, France, Spain and Poland.
She is a Distinguished Fellow in the University of Western Sydney’s Writing and
Society Research Centre.
No comments:
Post a Comment