Fiona Wright

Small Acts of Disappearance is a collection of ten essays that describes the author's affliction with an eating disorder which begins in high school, and escalates into life-threatening anorexia over the next ten years. Fiona Wright is a highly regarded poet and critic, and her account of her illness is informed by a keen sense of its contradictions and deceptions, and by an awareness of the empowering effects of hunger, which is unsparing in its consideration of the author's own actions and motivations. The essays offer perspectives on the eating disorder at different stages in Wright's life, at university, where she finds herself in a radically different social world to the one she grew up in, in Sri Lanka as a fledgling journalist, in Germany as a young writer, in her hospital treatments back in Sydney. They combine research, travel writing, memoir, and literary discussions of how writers like Christina Stead, Carmel Bird, Tim Winton, John Berryman and Louise Gluck deal with anorexia and addiction; together with accounts of family life, and detailed and humorous views of hunger-induced situations of the kind that are so compelling in Wright's poetry.

Small Acts of Disappearance

The follow-up to Fiona Wright's essay collection Small Acts of Disappearance, - winner of the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for Non-fiction shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the NSW Premier's Award for Non-fiction. Our bodies and homes are our shelters, each one intimately a part of the other. But what about those who feel anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled within these havens? In The World Was Whole, Fiona Wright examines how we inhabit and remember the familiar spaces of our homes and suburbs, as we move through them and away from them into the wider world, devoting ourselves to the routines and rituals that make up our lives. These affectingly personal essays consider how all-consuming the engagement with the ordinary can be, and how even small encounters and interactions can illuminate our lives. Many of the essays are set in the inner and south-western suburbs of a major Australian city in the midst of rapid change. Others travel to the volcanic coastline of Iceland, the mega-city of Shanghai, the rugged Surf Coast of southern Victoria. The essays are poetic and observant, and often funny, animated by curiosity and candour. Beneath them all lies the experience of chronic illness and its treatment, and the consideration of how this can reshape and reorder our assumptions about the world and our place within it.

The World Was Whole

‘a furious take on housing inequality’—The Australian, ‘the big books of 2026’ Your dream home awaits – there’s only two things in your way... The great Australian dream is slipping out of reach for Keira and her friends. No partner, no house, no kids. At 30-ahem, she is still languishing in a mould-filled share house, with an unexplained and ever-growing hole in the floorboards that threatens to consume her and her housemates. Her part-time job as a nanny to a pair of atrocious twins – and her role as emotional support servant at the beck and call of their mother, Johanna – provides barely enough money for the G&Ts she finds necessary to get through her other job as a freelance copywriter – though it does allow her to steal a fancy avocado every now and then. Each day she can feel herself falling further and further behind. When her best friend Dylan is able to buy an apartment with the help of his partner’s inheritance, Keira sees a way out. The bank of Mum and Dad. But what to do with parents who are in the rudest of health, and whose plans threaten to spend the only lifeline she has? From the lounge room of her rotting share house she hatches a deadly plan to speed up the process of wealth transfer. An audacious book that asks just how far you will go to get your dream house (or at least a one bedroom flat without mushrooms growing in the bathroom). PRAISE FOR KILL YOUR BOOMERS ‘When parental money becomes a looming solution, desperation sharpens into something darker – and all too recognisably millennial.’—The Sydney Morning Herald, Books to look forward to in 2026 ‘The gloriously vicious revenge plot “The Great Australian Dream” deserves. A devastating portrait of precarity. Funny, harsh, and sharp in all the right places. A book for the one-third of the population who've been kicked while they're down with a rent increase. A book for a well-meaning middle-class book club to fight over. A beautiful book. Another Wright success.’ —Bri Lee, author of Seed ‘This is a dark, hilarious and urgent book about a younger generation being locked out of the housing market and all the boomers who still think it's because they spend too much on avocado on toast.’ —Felicity Castagna, author of No More Boats

Fiona Wright

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