Mere hours after finishing the first draft of her novel Stone Yard Devotional, about a woman who retreats to a monastery in the face of personal crisis, Australian author Charlotte Wood received a call back for a breast screening – and was diagnosed with cancer.
“It was just the weirdest timing,” she says. Both her sisters were diagnosed with breast cancer around the same time. “Everything just sort of collapsed.”
When she returned to the book, she found she was a changed person: “Everything had been stripped back to the elements of what’s important to you as a person.” This newfound clarity encouraged her to “double down” on her initial impulse with the novel, “to just strip away anything inessential”.
That clarity has been rewarded: on Tuesday morning, Wood became the first Australian to be shortlisted for the $98,000 prize since Richard Flanagan won in 2014, joining international heavyweights Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner among the list of six finalists.
In the wake of the announcement on Tuesday morning, Wood said she was still processing the news: “I don’t even know what to say about it – it’s such a deep, deep honour.”
“There’s so much luck involved [in literary prizes],” she said, citing author Julian Barnes’s famous quip that the Booker was like “posh bingo”.
“We writers don’t write for prize judges, but it’s so moving when you feel that your work has been seen by serious people and is being held up as an example of good work. It’s the ultimate [recognition].”
Stone Yard Devotional is Wood’s seventh novel and her most personal, inspired by her mother and her childhood in the sparse Monaro plains of southern New South Wales. The novel’s narrator, a conservationist overwhelmed by her inability to effect change in the face of the climate crisis, initially retreats to a monastery on the Monaro plains for a brief respite, but finds in the gentle rhythms of the convent a more lasting solace.
The judging panel, chaired by acclaimed memoirist and artist Edmund De Waal, and including authors Yiyun Lee and Sara Collins, said Wood’s novel “thrilled and chilled” them, describing it as “a fierce and philosophical interrogation of history, memory, nature, and human existence. It is set in a claustrophobic environment and reveals the vastness of the human mind: the juxtaposition is so artfully done that a reader feels trusted by the author to be an intellectual partner”.
Wood says the novel was profoundly shaped by two serious upheavals in her life – one global, the other personal. The first was the “compelled stillness” of pandemic lockdowns in Australia, during which she wrote the novel. “After I had an initial panic of freaking out about the stillness, then I could see that there were really valuable things about it,” she says.
The second was the cancer diagnosis, coupled with those of her sisters. All are well now she says, but with hindsight she perceives that “maybe if I hadn’t had that experience, I may have been a bit more reassuring, or tried to soften the austerity [or spaciousness] of the book in some ways”.
“But I guess what it made me do is go, ‘No, I want this spaciousness, and I’m not going to change it out of anxiety to please a reader.’”
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Critics have noted this quality in the book: in the Guardian, author Fiona Wright described Stone Yard Devotional as “a more introspective book than Wood’s more recent novels – more stripped back and less social than The Weekend (2019) and less speculative and overtly political than The Natural Way of Things (2015)”, and drew a parallel with the “confined spaces and atmospheric moods” of Wood’s earlier novels The Submerged Cathedral (2004) and The Children (2007).
Wood herself describes her latest novel as “a less easy book, certainly, than [previous novel] The Weekend”.
“It asks more of a reader, it’s quieter, I think it’s deeper – and I think it’s my best book. But books that do kind of ask something of a reader are sometimes not the ones that people love or that get a lot of attention.”
It makes the Booker prize recognition that much sweeter, Wood says. Even being longlisted has had “an incredible effect”.
“It’s eye-opening in terms of global attention and book deals. It’s like nothing I’ve seen. Certainly a lot more international attention has come to my work.”