Fiona Wright named Charles Perkins Centre 2024 Writer-in-Residence

Acclaimed Australian poet, editor and critic Fiona Wright is the 2024 Judy Harris Writer-in-Residence Fellow at the Charles Perkins Centre, receiving $100,000 to support the next 12 months as she embarks on her third collection of essays. Coming out of her experience of COVID, the collection will examine future perspectives on science, society and selfhood.

Now in its eighth year, the Fellowship is a pioneering initiative that enables leading Australian creative writers to navigate the complex health and social challenges our world faces, alongside global health researchers and educators at the University of Sydney.

“The residency at the Charles Perkins Centre has always been appealing to me – I’ve applied every year since it started in 2016,” Wright said. “As a writer I’ve had a long-held interest in science and medicine, and the interconnections between society, science and selfhood. I am also fascinated by how new and emerging ideas find traction and become embedded in our lives.” 

Wright is renowned for the deeply personal revelations in her work, detailing her own experiences with eating disorders, autism, and disability, a practice she wishes to continue during her fellowship.

“My work has always been interested in the possibilities of personal stories, as a powerful means of building empathy and awareness, and exploring the ways in which big-picture issues are experienced and felt across our individual lives.”

Her anticipated third collection of essays arose out of a series of questions she encountered during the pandemic and is still grappling with in its aftermath.

“After the pandemic, I became really interested in the stories that we tell ourselves about the future and the ways we imagine and expect it to play out,” Wright said. “In the first lockdown, there was a lot of grief and confusion. A lot of people around me were saying things like ‘this isn’t supposed to happen’ or ‘this isn’t following my plan’ and it blew my mind. I've never been a planner or thought that you have much control over your future.” 

Drawing from research from a wide range of disciplines as well as personal stories and lived experiences, Wright’s idea for the essay collection is to explore the narratives we carry that shape our expectations for our lives and of the world; assumptions that are often so ingrained and familiar, sometimes they’re impossible for us to see until they’re shattered.

“Living with chronic illness and receiving my autism diagnosis in 2020, right at a time when the world suddenly became unavailable, upended some of my long-held narratives about myself and my future,” she said. “The narratives I had absorbed about medicine – about its infallibility and objectivity, and about control – proved flawed, and the loss of these narratives affected me deeply. Watching other people begin to grapple with this kind of loss over these last years has been a profound experience. 

“I became fascinated by ideas about the future – both on a personal and societal level – where they come from, how they are understood by neuroscience and psychology, or affected by history and cultural norms, what they might mean and what we might need instead, in a time of ever-increasing precarity and existential threat.”

It's the second time a poet and essayist has been selected for the residency, after Sarah Holland-Batt in 2021.

“I am drawn to essays and poems as a form because they allow for many-angled examinations of complex questions that resist tidy answers,” Wright said. “So much of my work as a poet is just me in a room, working through the thoughts in my head. It’s been incredible to receive feedback from previous applications and now financial support from the Charles Perkins Centre to be part of something more collaborative through this year’s Fellowship.” 

The 2024 Fellowship is the final year that Professor Stephen Simpson, Academic Director of the Charles Perkins Centre, will be involved before he moves to another role at the University. 

“Fiona is an outstanding and acclaimed writer with an impressive body of work that is insightful, powerful and moving,” Professor Simpson said. 

“It makes me incredibly proud that the Writer-in-Residence program, generously funded by our donor and patron Judy Harris, is highly regarded by Australia’s creative writer community. The transformative Fellowship has greatly enriched the Charles Perkins Centre, the University of Sydney and our wider community, and has supported many of Australia’s premier writers.

"I am delighted that Fiona is joining us and I look forward to working with her as she explores some of the great health challenges and questions that shape us and our society, particularly through times of uncertainty and upheaval."

Fiona Wright’s writing has been published in various literary journals, newspapers, art catalogues and magazines across the world. Her debut collection of poetry, Knuckled (2011) received the Dame Mary Gilmore Award in 2012, and her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays in Hunger (2015) won the Kibble Award, the University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for non-fiction in 2016. Her latest book of essays, The World Was Whole (2018) was longlisted for the Stella Prize in 2019 and the Nib Award for research, and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize.

Read more about the Judy Harris Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the Charles Perkins Centre.

Hero photo: Professor Stephen Simpson, Fiona Wright and Judy Harris in the Charles Perkins Centre. Photo: Michael Amendolia.