Judith Wright was born in
Armidale, New South Wales. The eldest child of
Phillip Wright and his first wife, Ethel, she spent most of her formative years in
Brisbane and
Sydney. Wright was of
Cornish ancestry. Following the early death of her mother, she lived with her aunt and then boarded at
New England Girls' School after her father's remarriage in 1929. After graduating, Wright studied philosophy, English, psychology and history at the
University of Sydney. At the beginning of
World War II, she returned to her father's
station (
ranch) to help during the shortage of labour caused by the war. Wright's first book of poetry,
The Moving Image, was published in 1946 while she was working at the
University of Queensland as a research officer. Then, she had also worked with
Clem Christesen on the literary magazine
Meanjin, the first edition of which was published in late 1947. In 1966, she published
The Nature of Love, her first collection of short stories, through Sun Press, Melbourne. Set mainly in Queensland, they include 'The Ant-lion', 'The Vineyard Woman', 'Eighty Acres', 'The Dugong', 'The Weeping Fig' and 'The Nature of Love', all first published in The Bulletin. Wright was nominated for the 1967
Nobel Prize for Literature. With
David Fleay,
Kathleen McArthur and
Brian Clouston, Wright was a founding member and, from 1964 to 1976, president, of the
Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. In 1991, she was the second Australian to receive the
Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. For the last three decades of her life, Wright lived near the New South Wales town of
Braidwood. She moved to the Braidwood area to be closer to
H. C. "Nugget" Coombs, her lover of 25 years, who was based in Canberra. Wright started to lose her hearing in her mid-20s and became completely deaf by 1992. ==Poet and critic==