Fiona Wright

Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction and was shortlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize. Her poetry collections are Knuckled, which won the 2012 Dame Mary Gilmore Award, and Domestic Interior, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Her most recent essay collection is The World Was Whole.
All essays by Fiona Wright
Mysterious Beings
‘Any child we bring into our lives will be ours’, Sentilles writes, and ‘all children – whether we give birth to them or find them some other way – are also not ours.’ They are strangers, all of them, ‘mysterious beings’ whose inner lives we can only guess at, extrapolating from experiences we only half-remember.
On Being A Precedent
Every time I hear the words new normal I feel a recoil, swift and small and deep within my belly. I hate how normal we find the idea of normal, how many other narratives and experiences and people it excludes and elides and diminishes. I hate how often it’s assumed that normal is something we only ever choose not to be, rather than something that rejects us regardless of whether or not (and consciously or not) we try to mould ourselves to fit. And I hated, at the beginning of the pandemic, how each time I heard the phrase the only thing that I could think was this:
For me, new normal is old news.
‘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.