Winner of the Stella Prize

Winner of the Magarey Medal for Biography

Winner of the Queensland Literary Award

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2025

Alexis Wright returns to non-fiction in Tracker, a collective memoir of the charismatic Aboriginal leader, political thinker and entrepreneur Tracker Tilmouth. Taken from his family as a child and brought up in a mission on Croker Island, Tracker worked tirelessly for Aboriginal self-determination, creating opportunities for land use and economic development in his many roles, including Director of the Central Land Council of the Northern Territory.

Tracker was a visionary, a strategist and a projector of ideas, renowned for his irreverent humour and his determination to tell things the way he saw them. Having known him for many years, Alexis Wright interviewed Tracker, along with family, friends, colleagues, and the politicians he influenced, weaving his and their stories together in a manner reminiscent of the oral history writing of Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich. The book is as much a testament to the powerful role played by storytelling in contemporary Aboriginal life as it is to the legacy of an extraordinary man.

‘How do you tell an impossible story, one that is almost too big to contain in a single book?’ asks Alexis Wright. Tracker Tilmouth, Eastern Arrernte man, taken from his family, raised on a mission with his brothers, grows into a leader of indefatigable energy and astuteness, also renowned for his irreverent humour. Told through seven years of interviews, and from travelling with Tracker across Country, Alexis Wright transforms all preconceptions of biography. She weaves a journey through storytelling into the heart and mind of a man who tirelessly contests colonialism’s ongoing damage to Australia’s First Nations peoples. This is in an epical book, testimony to one extraordinary visionary, gathered through collective voices, inheritors of 60,000+ years of continuous culture. Tracker’s bequest is his ‘resistant orality’ (African American poet Harryette Mullen’s powerful term). A remarkable tribute that houses a never-ending story of sustaining sovereignty and survival against all odds.’ —  Prof. Deirdre Osborne

Alexis Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and fearless writers. 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 outside Australia, including in China, the US, the UK, Italy, France and Poland. Wright is the only author to win Australia’s two most prestigious prizes twice each, the Miles Franklin Award (in 2007 for Carpentaria and 2024 for Praiseworthy) and the Stella Prize (in 2018 for Tracker and 2024 for Praiseworthy). Praiseworthy has won or been a finalist for seven UK, Irish and Australian prizes.

And Other Stories, 2025.