Judith Wright

Judith Wright (Judith Arundell Wright), 1915-2000, Australian poet. After graduating from the Univ. of Sydney, she worked variously as a clerk, secretary, and statistician. She is regarded as one of the most important Australian writers of the 20th cent. Her lyric poetry is marked by sensitivity of interpretation and absolute mastery of technique. Among her volumes of poetry are The Moving Image (1946), The Gateway (1953), City Sunrise (1964), Collected Poems, 1942-1970 (1971), and Phantom Dwelling (1985). She also published books for children; biographies of the Australian writers Charles Harpur and Charles Lawson; a volume of short stories (1966); and the critical work Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965). Wright was an activist in her homeland, speaking out and writing on such issues as environmental protection and land rights for aborigines.

Bibliography: See her autobiography, Half a Lifetime (1999); studies by P. G. Kenemy (1972), N. Simms, ed. (1976), S. Walker (1980, 1991), and J. Strauss (1995).

Wright, Judith (1915–2000), Australian poet, brought up in New South Wales. Her first book, The Moving Image (1946) made her reputation, which was enhanced through more than a dozen later volumes, including Collected Poems (1994). From the beginning, her poems have been shapely in form, lyrical and meditative, concerned with love (as in her classic ‘Woman to Man’), and with the rural and wild landscapes of Australia. She was long involved with the conservation movement and its political implications: this resulted in a sharper, more combative tone, and an anger with what she saw as White Australia's betrayal of the Aborigines in matters of landownership and spiritual inheritance.