Fiona Wright

Fiona Wright is a writer from Sydney. Her collection of essays Small Acts of Disappearance was published by Giramondo in 2015, and has been shortlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize and the NSW Premier’s Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction, and long-listed for the Kibble Award for Australian Women’s Life Writing. Her poetry collection Knuckled (Giramondo) won the Dame Mary Gilmore Award in 2012.
Fiona has recently completed a PhD at Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre, examining the suburban poetry of Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Porter.
Fiona’s criticism and reviews have appeared in The Australian, Australian Book Review, Cordite Poetry Review, The Lifted Brow, Sydney Morning Herald and The Sydney Review of Books. Her poetry and essays are published in Antipodes, HEAT, Island, Going Down Swinging, Overland, Meanjin, Seizure and in publications in the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Germany.
All essays by Fiona Wright
‘I Need My Literature to Know About it’
What becomes evident is not so much a portrait of Daylight as a reader, but her skill as a critic, her ability to distill enough detail from a work to understand – and convey something of – its essence, to trace the author’s thinking and engagement with the world.
When The Manuals Fail Us: Exploded View by Carrie Tiffany
the manual also represents a system of knowledge, an empirical way of looking at the world, or at least one small part of it, that is rational, logical, complete. It’s a diagram and a schemata, everything accounted for and with a purpose, function, and means of repair. And it’s a system of knowledge that falls down entirely when the narrator tries to transfer it to her wider world – because a family is not an engine, where ‘everything is straight. Everything is clean’, all the parts are ‘gilded, all snug up, side by side’. The parts don’t fit together perfectly, and they don’t add up to something that runs smoothly and well.
A Regular Choreography
Travel is supposed to be transformative, worldly, independent, brave. It is supposed to be a breaking free from the things that bind us to our everyday and repetitious – and by implication dull and stultifying – lives. We are supposed to value travel because of this, because it is international and not domestic, unsettling and not homely, disjunctive rather than routine. And I want these things, of course I want these things for my life and for that idea of myself as I’d like to be.
For love and hunger
In the year that I first became ill, I recognised the physicality of Teresa’s hunger, and I carried it with me for years, although the rest of For Love Alone did not stir me – I was nineteen, and probably too callow, too cold and self-obsessed to fully understand it. But in the last two years, I started hearing so many writers talk again about Christina Stead.