Clare Wright

Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media. 

Clare is currently Professor of History and inaugural Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University. She is the author of four works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (winner of the 2014 Stella Prize) and You Daughters of Freedom, which comprise the first two instalments of her Democracy Trilogy. (Both short-listed in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.) 

Clare’s essays, opeds and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Guardian Weekly, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Overland, The Conversation, The Age/SMH, The Australian and her academic articles have been published in leading international and national scholarly journals. 

Clare created and co-wrote the award-winning four-part ABC TV history series, The War That Changed Us, and created, wrote and presented the ABC TV history documentary, Utopia Girls. Her book The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is being adapted for a 10-part internationally co-produced drama series with Ruby Entertainment and Hoodlum US. (Clare is producing and writing the screen adaptation.) She hosts the ABC Radio National history series, Shooting the Past, and co-hosts the La Trobe University podcast Archive Fever, now in its fourth season.

Clare has appeared on Q&A, The Drum, The Project and Behind the News giving an historical perspective on current affairs. She is popular public speaker, panellist and interviewer and makes frequent appearances at literary festivals, in television documentaries, on radio talk shows, in other people’s podcasts and generally anywhere someone will pass her a microphone. 

In 2020, Clare was awarded an Order of Australia Award for “services to literature and to historical research”.  In 2022 she was appointed to the Council of the National Museum of Australia and is a past Board Director at The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.

Clare is the co-founder and co-convenor of A Monument of One’s Own, a national advocacy body for statue equality whose Patron is Julia Gillard.  In 2023, in her capacity as Professor of Public Engagement, Clare was the Guest Curator of the Bendigo Writers Festival.

The third instalment of Clare’s Democracy Trilogy, a history of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions based on a decade of documentary research and community consultation, will be published by Text in early 2024.

Clare lives on unceded Wurundjeri land in Melbourne/Naarm.