Charlotte Wood

Charlotte Wood is editor of The Writer’s Room Interviews magazine and the author of five books. Her last novel, Animal People (2011), was shortlisted for the 2013 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award. Her new novel The Natural Way of Things will be published in October 2015.
All essays by Charlotte Wood
Across the face of the sun
I still don’t fully understand The Transit of Venus, which I suspect is why I will keep returning to it throughout my life. It has been fascinating to observe, in other writers’ responses, how often they remark on seeing its greatness only on a second visit – often decades after first buying or reading it.
‘I have had my vision’
The more I go on, the more I am convinced that a great book is one which leads its readers away from the worn path of what they already know, to a wild and unfamiliar place where new logics and understandings can take hold. But of course there is nothing new in this – it is what any gifted editor has always known: that each book is its own wild creature, and that sometimes it is in disorder and inconsistency and ambiguity where the greatest art lies.
All essays featuring Charlotte Wood
Listen to the Sirens: The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
‘Charlotte Wood’s fifth novel The Natural Way of Things is a virtuoso performance, plotted deftly through a minefield of potential traps, weighted with allegory yet swift and sure in its narrative advance. In Wood’s fictional imagining, the mechanism of punitive control is simply to remove those whose sexuality has become a provocative inconvenience to powerful men. It’s galling, but is it impossible?’