The Stranger Artist

Winner of the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.

Set amid the striking landscapes of the East Kimberley, The Stranger Artist is an evocative and enthralling account of a remarkable decade in Australia’s internationally acclaimed Aboriginal art movement.

At the end of the twentieth century, one-time gallerist Tony Oliver finds himself deeply immersed within a group of senior Gija artists, among them the soon-to-be-renowned painters Paddy Bedford and Freddie Timms. Their unlikely bonds lead to the formation of the groundbreaking Jirrawun Arts, which quickly becomes one of Australia’s most celebrated and controversial art collectives. As Oliver comes to share not only the artists’ many successes but their tragedies too, his own life’s trajectory will forever be altered.

Quentin Sprague’s The Stranger Artist is an extraordinary contribution to Australia’s cultural history – a sensitive yet unflinching portrait of creative work, of a life between cultures, of both darkness and light.