Join Fiona Wright for the launch of her new essay collection,
The World Was Whole.

The book will be launched by award-winning poet and author Pip Smith.

Copies of The World Was Whole will be available for sale at the event, along with drinks and finger food from Acre Eatery.

6.30pm Thursday 1 November
Camperdown Commons
31 Mallett St
Camperdown NSW 2050

The World Was Whole

Fiona Wright

Fiona Wright’s follow-up to her award-winning essay collection Small Acts of Disappearance.

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.

Download high-res cover image

ISBN : 9781925336979
pp : 256
Published : October 2018