My Blood's Country

An intensely personal exploration and celebration of the life and work of one of Australia's premier poets, Judith Wright, through the landscape and country she loved so much.

'Sometimes in life you get lucky. Someone of rare vision and remarkable gifts crosses your path .'

Fiona Capp, novelist and author of the acclaimed memoir That Oceanic Feeling, was 17 years old when she first met Judith Wright. Everything that followed from this encounter led her, 30 years later, on a journey through the landscapes that made Wright one of Australia's greatest poets and environmental visionaries.

Capp follows in Wright's footsteps through the high tableland of New England, the rainforests of Queensland and the austere bushland outside Canberra, uncovering the land out of which the poetry sprang. Her travels also take the reader through the life of the poet - the early tragedy that shaped her childhood, her complex relationship with her family, and the two great loves of her life - while exploring the well-springs of Wright's art and activism.

Judith Wright sensed in her bones that something had gone profoundly wrong with our attitude to the earth, long before the term 'conservationist' entered public discourse. In this intimate and moving memoir, Fiona Capp shows how the 'country that built my heart' - as Wright called it - became part of the collective consciousness of the nation; how her poetry created a place that belongs to all of us.

Fiona Capp was born in Melbourne in 1963. She trained as a journalist, has a PhD in English and has worked as a freelance writer and university tutor in English, journalism and novel writing. She is the internationally published author of two works of non-fiction - Writers Defiled and That Oceanic Feeling, a memoir about her love for the sea and surfing, which won the Australians Studying Abroad Travel Writing Prize and the Nita B. Kibble Literary Award for women writers - and three novels - Night Surfing, Last of the Sane Days and Musk and Byrne. Capp lives in Melbourne, with her partner and son.