Shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction

Longlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize

The follow-up to Fiona Wright's essaycollection 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 areour shelters, each one intimately a part of the other. But what about those whofeel anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled within these havens? In The World WasWhole, Fiona Wright examines how we inhabit and remember the familiar spacesof our homes and suburbs, as we move through them and away from them into thewider world, devoting ourselves to the routines and rituals that make up ourlives. These affectingly personal essays consider how all-consuming theengagement with the ordinary can be, and how even small encounters andinteractions can illuminate our lives.

Many of the essays are setin the inner and south-western suburbs of a major Australian city in the midstof rapid change. Others travel to the volcanic coastline of Iceland, themega-city of Shanghai, the rugged Surf Coast of southern Victoria. The essaysare poetic and observant, and often funny, animated by curiosity and candour.Beneath them all lies the experience of chronic illness and its treatment, andthe consideration of how this can reshape and reorder our assumptions about theworld and our place within it.

'In this exquisite follow-on from her award-winning memoir-in-essays Small Acts of Disappearance, Fiona Wright continues to set the standard for the essay form in Australia.' - Jo Case, Books+Publishing

Praise for Small Acts of Disappearance:

'Wright has a gift for compression, lyricism, and apoet's ear for rhythm, all of which animate even the most heartbreakingpassages.' - The Australian

'Each essay works as a kindof poetic auto-ethnography, moving between inexplicable realities of the selfand those of the world-at-large; between life's surfaces and interiors.' - Sydney Morning Herald