Career
Wright has a background in archaeology, history, linguistics, anthropology and comparative culture. He has written both fiction and non-fiction books dealing with anthropology and civilizations. His 1992 non-fiction book Stolen Continents: The "New World" Through Indian Eyes was awarded the 1993 Gordon Montador Award from the Writers' Trust of Canada and his 1998 novel A Scientific Romance, about a museum curator who travels into the future and investigates the fate of the human race, won the David Higham Prize for Fiction for first-time novelists. The novel, Henderson's Spear, published in 2002, was about a jailed filmmaker piecing together her family history in Polynesia.
In 2002 he moved from Port Hope, Ontario to Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, near his wife's work as a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Wright traces the origins of the ideas behind A Short History of Progress to the material he studied while writing A Scientific Romance and his 2000 essay for The Globe and Mail titled "Civilization is a Pyramid Scheme" about the fall of the ninth-century Mayan civilization.
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