Writer On The Rise

It’s a rarity for novelists to be paid much at all for their work.

- Alan Deans

But since her latest book, The Natural Way of Things, won the Stella Prize for women writers and catapulted her to international prominence, Charlotte Wood is breathing a sigh of relief.

“Last year my book just went crazy, which was a great shock because I had accepted I was always going to struggle economically. So suddenly my book was much more successful than anyone expected, and it won prizes and was published overseas. I am really glad that happened at my age. I know what it is and what it isn’t. I am not expecting that will happen again, ever probably.”

Wood is completing a residency at Sydney University’s Charles Perkins Centre, a medical research institute and an unlikely patron of literature. The grand, swirling structure of the centre’s interior helped it to be nominated for the world’s best building in 2016. It is an unlikely place to find a novelist, working among those who research treatments for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and other diseases. Normally, Wood would be seeking inspiration in a tiny studio in the garden of her home in inner urban Marrickville. But the residency grant is breathing life into her next work.

“With this residency,” she explains, “I have now got a couple of years of full-time writing, financially, which has never happened before. I was always doing freelance writing or teaching, or journalism. I was on a PhD scholarship for three years writing The Natural Way of Things and I worked as a sub-editor. I had lots of different part-time work, and I will go back to that eventually. But to have the luxury of full-time writing is amazing.”