David Thomas, Henry Wright (with Chris Arnold)
David Thomas Henry Wright is an author, poet, digital artist, and academic. He won the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards’ Digital Literature Prize, 2019 Robert Coover Award for a work of Electronic Literature (2nd prize), and 2021 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. He has been shortlisted for multiple other international literary prizes, and published in various academic and creative journals. He has a PhD (Comparative Literature) from Murdoch University and a Masters (Creative Writing) from The University of Edinburgh, and taught Creative Writing at China’s top university, Tsinghua. He is currently co-editor of The Digital Review, narrative consultant for Stanford University's Smart Primer research project, and Associate Professor (Comparative Literature) at Nagoya University in Japan. Through a è‹¥æ‰‹ç ”ç©¶ Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI grant, he is researching new approaches to the interpenetration of born-digital and print literature, and has just completed a born-digital novel funded by an Australia Council for the Arts grant.
The Perfect Democracy
The Perfect Democracy is an Australia Council for the Arts-funded born-digital novel that takes as its subject the entire population of contemporary Australia. It is also about the impossibility of representing this subject. Therefore, a digital format has been used to traverse the polyphony of voices. Visible images of Australian currency have been employed as a structural device to represent the whole society from the richest to the poorest in the quickest way possible. A multitude of simultaneous writing formats and voices have been used to precisely depict characterisation. These include digital palimpsestic writing, 3D formatted writing, scrolling stream of consciousness, text-based conversations that are interjected with stream-of-consciousness, and kinetic text. As a digital object, the novel adopts an ‘O’ or frame-like shape, with no set point of entry.