Australian author Charlotte Wood makes Booker shortlist

Novelist Charlotte Wood still can’t wrap her head around being one of six finalists – and the first Australian in a decade – to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction.

“I’ve had a few days to get used to the idea, and I’m still not used to the idea,” she says. “I would never have expected this in my whole career. It’s just a wonderful bolt from the blue.”

Charlotte Wood says her latest book is the most personal she has written.Credit: Henry Simmons

Wood has been nominated for her acclaimed novel Stone Yard Devotional, the response to which has been incredible, she says. “I’ve had a lot of very deep responses to it ... I’ve had the most intense emails from readers, more than I’ve had to any other book.”

“I do think that our capacity for sustained, quiet engagement has been really kind of damaged by contemporary life. It’s getting harder and harder to look within because everything about our world is designed to distract us, to look out, rather than to be still and look in,” she says.

“Many people have said this to me ‘I couldn’t just flip through it, I had to sink down and go to a quiet space in my mind’. And that’s very gratifying because that’s what the book is about, going into that quiet space.”

Stone Yard Devotional traces a woman’s rejection of the modern world for a life of service, contemplation, and devotion in an outback nunnery in NSW.

Wood says this is the most personal book she’s written and the first that weaves through autobiographical material, particularly in the narrator’s relationship with her mother. Soon after finishing the first draft, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, as were her two sisters, all within six weeks.

The Sydney-based author loved the judges’ comment that “a reader feels trusted by the author to be an intellectual partner in this exchange, rather than a passive recipient of stories and messages”.

“That’s what I really loved trying for in this book, making space for the reader to enter into the making of the book,” she says. “There’s a privacy in the exchange between a reader and a writer that is unmediated and unaffected by sort of outside distraction. And that’s what I value in reading.”

In January, Wood became the first Australian long-listed for the prize since J.M. Coetzee in 2016. Past Australian winners include Thomas Keneally, Richard Flanagan, Peter Carey (twice), D.B.C. Pierre and Australian-raised Aravind Adiga. No Australian woman has ever won the Booker, though Kate Grenville, Gail Jones and Madeleine St John have been nominated.

In a first, five of the six finalists for the $98,000 award are women: American writer Percival Everett – nominated for James, which reimagines Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of its main black character, the enslaved man Jim – is the only male.

Also shortlisted is American Rachel Kushner – a former Booker finalist with her bestseller The Mars Room – with spy story Creation Lake. Britain’s Samantha Harvey is shortlisted for Orbital, Canada’s Anne Michaels for Held and Dutch author Yael van der Wouden for her debut, The Safekeep.

Organisers said the stories transport readers from World War I battlefields to America’s Deep South in the 19th century to the International Space Station.

“Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here,” said author Edmund de Waal, who chairs this year’s five-member judging panel. “They are books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them.”

The winner will be announced on November 12 at a ceremony in London.

With AP

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.