Tracker

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 A larger-than-life champion of Aboriginal self-determination, Tracker Tilmouth was whip-smart, irreverent, startling, and deadly serious, famous for rattling the chains of Australian political life wherever he went. One day he asked a novelist-friend for help with his memoirs. Wright agreed, though she knew it would take a whole community to do his life justice. Thousands of interview hours later, the result was Tracker: a groundbreaking piece of creative oral history, a testament to the power of storytelling in contemporary Aboriginal life, and a living monument to a legendary warrior of conscience. ‘A magnificent work of collaborative storytelling.’ The Age (Australia)

About the Author :
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. 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.

Review :
‘A magnificent work of collaborative storytelling.’ The Age (Australia) ‘Wright builds, as much as anyone is able to in writing, a detailed portrait of a complex man, whose vision “to sculpt land, country and people into a brilliant future on a grand scale” is inevitably accompanied by an irrepressible humour and suspicion of authority.’ The Guardian ‘Tilmouth was a man who worked through conversation and yarn more than with paper and pen, and this is a book about the place of the story in Indigenous culture and politics as much as it is about Tracker himself.’ The Monthly ‘Wright enacts the complex relationship between self and community that a Western biography could not. There is a cumulative power in the repetitions, backtrackings and digressions the formula necessitates: a sinuous, elegant accommodation of selves. It is a book as epical in form and ambition as the life it describes.’ The Australian ‘Tracker, a book performed by a folk ensemble rather than a solo virtuoso, adds to her enduring non-fiction oeuvre that captures the unique ground-level realpolitik of Aboriginal Australia.’ Australian Book Review 'Alexis Wright’s work is a living, breathing testament to oral storytelling . . . Wright challenges western notions of biography, privileging contradiction and collective memory over linear storytelling. It demands patience, but the reward is immense: a portrait not just of a man but of history in motion. Storytelling here is resistance – complex, unfiltered, and utterly compelling.’ Adam Wyeth, Irish Times