Alexis Wright

Carpentaria

Mark Worden (Standard British accent):

The October issue of Speak Up features an interview with the Australian author Alexis Wright, who spent six years writing her novel Carpentaria. In this out-take she explains how she finally found her voice as a writer after a couple of years:

Alexis Wright (Australian accent):

I was coming home one day and I was living in Alice Springs, I was coming back from town and going across the footbridge and there was (sic) two elderly Aboriginal men walking in front of me and they were talking about how their life was finishing up and, just in the way that they speak, it really hit me: that’s the way the novel had to be written. It had to be written in that voice. And I should have known it straightaway. I should have started there, and because I wanted the novel to be important to my own people, to my own area and, of course, the novel should be written in that style of voice and narrated in that way and in a way that an elderly aboriginal man perhaps would speak.

(Alexis Wright was talking to Julian Earwaker)