A radically structured account of the life of the Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth.

This is not a standard biography so much as a many-voiced oral archive arranged into book form. Wright builds Tracker through testimony, contradiction, memory, politics, and anecdote, letting a life emerge through the people who knew him rather than pinning him down into a neat authorised shape. The result is part portrait, part history of modern Aboriginal political struggle, part argument with the very idea of biography. It is big, discursive, and deliberately alive to voice.

Tracker comes through as difficult, strategic, charismatic, abrasive, funny, and materially embedded in land rights, policy, economics, and community. It’s an important Australian work, but more than that, it’s formally unusual in a way that makes it feel less dutiful than many “important books.”

Again, how Alexis Wright hasn't won the Nobel Prize yet, astonishes me. One day.