Eating disorders in focus for award winning Giramondo author

A new book by Western Sydney University doctoral candidate Fiona Wright explores the intellectual, emotional and physical aspects of hunger associated with the condition commonly known as anorexia.

Small Acts of Disappearance is a collection of ten essays by Wright describing the author's affliction with an eating disorder, which began in her late teens and escalated into life-threatening anorexia.

The essays offer perspectives on the experience of hunger at different stages in Wright's life, at university, where she finds herself in a radically different social world to the one she went to school in, in Sri Lanka as a fledgling journalist, in Germany as a young writer, in her hospital treatments back in Sydney. There are also perceptive discussions of novels by Christina Stead, Tim Winton and Carmel Bird, which feature anorexic heroines.

The essays combine research, travel writing, memoir, and literary criticism with accounts of family life and friendships, and detailed and humorous perspectives on awkward hunger-induced situations, of the kind that are so compelling in Wright's poetry book Knuckled (Giramondo 2011), which won the Dame Mary Gilmore Award for a first collection. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis, featuring the poets Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Porter, at the Writing & Society Research Centre.

Fiona Wright will discuss Small Acts of Disappearance with Rachel Morley, lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and host of the TVS book show Shelf Life on Wednesday 9th September at Gleebooks at 6.30pm. Her book will be launched at Knox St Bar on Tuesday 22 September, 6.30pm.

Ends

3 September 2015

Media contact: Mark Smith, Senior Media Officer