Judith Wright was born in 1915 at Thalgaroch Station, near Armidale in the New England district of NSW. Her forebears had been among the first settlers of the area in the early decades of the nineteenth century. She was educated at the University of Sydney, and taught at the University of Queensland from 1943-1947. Her first volume of poems, The Moving Image , was published in 1946. Her subsequent collections include Woman to Man (1949), The Gateway (1953), The Two Fires (1955), Birds (1962), Five Senses (1963), The Other Half (1966), Alive: Poems 1971-1972 (1973), Fourth Quarter and Other Poems (1976) and Phantom Dwelling (1985). Her Collected Poems 1942-1970 was published in 1971. Her poetry is now available in the volume A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (ETT Imprint, 1996).
Wright was an astute critic of Australian poetry, and her essays on Australian poets in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965) are a major contribution to Australian literary history. A further collection of literary essays and reviews, Because I Was Invited, was published in 1975. She gave an account of her family's history in Generations of Men (1959) and The Cry for the Dead (1981). Wright was a campaigner for Aboriginal land rights and an active conservationist, and her writing in these areas appear in We Call for a Treaty (1985), Born of the Conquerors (1991) and Going on Talking (1992).
A winner of many literary awards, Judith Wright received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1992. A biography, South of My Days, by Veronica Brady, was published by HarperCollins in 1998. She died in 2000.