Judith Wright Biography

Australian poet, writer, and critic, born at Armidale, New South Wales, educated at Sydney University. Her deeply felt attachment to the land, and her growing anger at mankind's exploitative abuse of both the land and Australia's indigenous people, inform much of her best poetry and prose. The complexities of personal relationships are also central to her work. Wright's first poetry collection, The Moving Image (1946), made a great impression for its expressive craftsmanship and poetic range; The Generations of Men (1959) and A Cry for the Dead (1981) traced her family's history, while Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965) provided important insights into her own imaginative concerns with illuminating readings of Australian literature and history. Her Collected Poems 1942–1970 were published in 1971, The Double Tree: Selected Poems 1942–1976 in 1978, and Phantom Dwelling in 1986. More recently she published Human Pattern: Selected Poems (1990); Through Broken Glass (1992); The Flame Tree (1994), fifteen poems presented bilingually in English and Japanese; and a further Collected Poems, 1942–1985 (1994). A collection of stories, The Nature of Love, appeared in 1966. Diverse writings were collected in Because I Was Invited (1975), while The Coral Battleground (1977) was a passionate argument of the need to defend Queensland's Great Barrier Reef from destruction by oil and mining activities. Later essays include Born of the Conquerors: Selected Essays of Judith Wright (1991) and Going on Talking (1992). She edited The Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1958).