Among the six finalists for the 2024 Booker Prize was the first Australian author in a decade: Charlotte Wood. The plot of Wood’s seventh book, the 2023 novel Stone Yard Devotional, unfolds inside a tiny rural Australian convent, where one woman embarks on an interior journey toward a greater understanding of her place within a wider world. Wood’s earlier novels contain explicit social critiques—The Natural Way of Things was a searing feminist dystopia, and The Weekend a vivid dissection of aging and friendship—but Stone Yard Devotional does its intellectual heavy lifting at an arm’s-length distance.
“I wanted to write a book that doesn’t teach or explain or condescend,” Wood told America in an interview over Zoom in February. At the same time, Stone Yard Devotional contemplates global tragedies—but from a slant and without didacticism. The world in which it is set, quite like ours, reels from a pandemic and the negative effects of climate change. Yet, in Wood’s words, Stone Yard Devotional is “a book of questions, more than answers.”
This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.
What was your source of inspiration for this book?
I feel like it’s taken me 10 books to learn how to write one. Stone Yard Devotional emerged from strange experiences, including the catastrophic Australian bushfires of 2019, which made climate change feel undeniably present. Then the pandemic hit, pulling the rug out from under any “certainty” we had about control. All of this was a humbling realization of Western hubris; scientists had warned us for decades, yet we ignored it.
I started writing this book with a lighter tone, but lockdowns made everything feel more serious. Toward the end, I turned to the songwriter Nick Cave’s words—“I felt chastened by the world”—and I thought: That’s exactly it. That’s how I feel. And those words became the book’s epigraph.
Did you approach this novel differently from how you’ve approached your other projects?
Early on in writing this book, I learned my older sister had cancer. Then, six weeks later, I was diagnosed, and a week after that, our younger sister was, too. We’ve all come out the other side, but it never really ends—physically and psychologically, the ripples go on. Then, there was another great chastening amid rolling global shocks—Australia’s fires, the pandemic, then devastating floods. All of this shaped the backdrop as I wrote about an atheist woman arriving at a Catholic convent.
Do you think works of fiction are obligated to engage in conversation with global events and tragedies?
The pandemic was so enormous that I couldn’t write a novel where it hadn’t happened, yet I didn’t want to write about it directly. The same went for climate change—it stayed outside the novel’s convent walls, though a real-life mouse plague made its way into the book. I believe novelists should respond to the world, but I didn’t want to preach or teach. I found a guiding idea in Yeats’s words: “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.” I wanted to write a book of questions, not answers.
In Stone Yard Devotional, the narrator wrestles with two ethical extremes—believing action is the antidote to despair, then confronting this action’s failures. She begins to wonder if the convent’s quiet restraint does more good than relentless action. She questions it. What are the nuns achieving here with their silly little songs and praying all day long? What good is that doing in the world? Then she realizes that, in staying still, they’re not causing any harm. They’re not slurping up resources. They’re just containing themselves. Maybe that restraint is doing more good than all the relentless pushing and acting she has done throughout her life, which drove her to leave the city, her career and her marriage behind to retreat into stillness.
What motivated your decision to choose the convent as the central setting of the novel?
I started writing this book with a question: Why would a contemporary woman choose to become a Catholic nun? I understand it historically, but in today’s world, especially as a feminist, it seemed like a strange choice, given the church’s ongoing sexism. But once I explored the idea of retreat, I understood the appeal: a highly ritualized, ordered life, where labor itself is worship. I respect that restraint and introspection. Some see it as selfish, but I find that view strange—we’re often suspicious of quiet, of stepping away from the world. Maybe we’re just afraid of stillness and silence.
The landscape in the novel is the Monaro Plains in southern New South Wales, where I grew up. It’s a stark, stripped-back place—treeless, with low grasses and scattered boulders. It can look almost lunar or desert-like, but there’s a quiet beauty to it. I hadn’t returned for years after my parents passed in my 20s, avoiding the grief tied to that land. But during the pandemic, I accompanied my husband on a work trip there, and something about stepping into that space after months of lockdown—being out in the world again—made me realize I wanted to write about it, my childhood and my mother.
As I wrote, I instinctively placed my imagined convent within that landscape, and I quickly saw how the two fit together. The voice of the book—stripped-back, unadorned—mirrored the land’s austerity. Later, in interviews, I found myself saying something I hadn’t consciously realized before: My narrator goes to this place because she knows the landscape will understand her. She’s in a spiritually barren state, and the land is just as bare. Writing this book became a deeper exercise in trusting intuition over deliberation, allowing the unconscious to guide the work rather than forcing decisions.
Did you hope that the book would inspire readers to retreat from the contemporary world?
I haven’t done religious retreats myself, though years ago, I stayed for a couple of days at a monastery guesthouse with a friend. However, I have spent weeks at a time alone on artists’ retreats, working in rural places without speaking aloud. So when it came to writing this book, I didn’t do much research—just a bit of superficial Googling. Early on, a young interviewer asked how many nuns I had interviewed, and when I said “zero,” she was shocked. But I wasn’t aiming for strict accuracy. I trusted my own experience of withdrawal from the world, of solitude, to inform the book’s emotional truth.
That trust was unexpectedly affirmed when I was invited to speak at a conference of Trappist monks and Benedictine nuns. I was terrified they’d call out everything I’d gotten wrong, but they were incredibly kind and said that while there were a few minor quibbles, the emotional reality of the book rang true. That was deeply heartening.
What fascinates me about monastic life is how we in the secular world tend to either romanticize or demonize it. We imagine it as a peaceful, spiritual retreat, but real solitude—true silence—can be confronting. In our daily lives, we can stay endlessly distracted, reacting to the external world. But in a life of strict routine and repetition, there’s no escape from the self. I once saw a nun mention how, in that environment, dreams and memories take on an almost hallucinatory vividness. I’ve experienced something similar in artists’ retreats, where interior imagery becomes startlingly potent. That was something I wanted to explore in the novel—the intensity of the mind when there’s nowhere left to hide.
In terms of inspiring readers, I didn’t have any particular hopes for the book beyond wanting it to move people, but I’ve been struck by how many readers have said: “I want to go to this place. Where is it?” The appeal of opting out of the world feels especially strong right now, when the constant onslaught of political and environmental crises can feel overwhelming. The idea of retreat—whether through digital detoxes or something more extreme—speaks to a deep craving for quiet. I just returned from the Jaipur Literature Festival, my first time in India, and the sheer sensory and ethical overload of seeing immense wealth alongside deep poverty reinforced that desire for stillness. But retreat is never as simple as escape; the reality is that you can’t hide from yourself in silence.
I’m also fascinated by how people coexist in closed communities—monasteries, schools, workplaces—where they don’t choose their companions but must find a way to live together. Over time, I think that’s become the central question in my writing: How do we live with people we wouldn’t choose, and do so in a way that is decent? It’s a profoundly difficult thing.
In a separate interview, you said that you wanted “nothing trivial and nothing insincere about this book.” Was using religion as a backbone for Stone Yard Devotional a way to achieve that end?
Yeah, maybe it was. Contemporary life often feels so trivial and insincere. When I step outside my house, I’m confronted by what feels like a flood of psychological, capitalist and even literal garbage—just everything pouring in, overwhelming the senses. And yet, it’s possible to be just as trivial in a religious institution if you choose to be. That’s something my narrator struggles with, particularly when she sees younger nuns speaking about Jesus as if he’s their boyfriend—like some kind of pop idol. What interests me about life in a religious community is the labor of being serious and the complexity of how to approach that. It’s a kind of intentional depth that one must strive for.
For my narrator, who doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t understand prayer, the process of trying to take part in this life is hard labor—trying not only to fit in but to truly understand it. She respects it and longs for it, but there’s always a part of her that wants to argue. She has this yearning to be as certain as the boss nun, yet she can’t quite cross the threshold of actual belief.
You grew up in a Catholic home, and your father was briefly a monk, but you’ve said publicly that you are not a believer. Of course, this novel has a convent of nuns as its setting. Are there ways that your Catholic background has affected your current spiritual life and your craft?
I’m pretty sure that growing up as a Catholic made me a writer. I went to Mass every Sunday from birth until I was 18, and—I don’t want to sound insulting—being forced into quiet boredom once a week was really good for a child like me. What felt like five hours when I was 7 years old meant that I had no choice but to enter into this sort of private, imaginative world while the rest of the church buzzed with activity.
The rich symbolism and material beauty of Catholicism also left an indelible mark on me—the stunning churches, the colors, candles, gold, incense, brocade and velvet—all of it captivated me, and it still does. I remember going to a non-Catholic Sunday school once and being horrified by how bare and uninspiring the space was in comparison to the sensory richness of the Catholic Church. It made me appreciate how deeply the experience of Catholicism has informed my sensibilities as a writer.
In addition to the sensory aspects, Catholicism gave me something deeper: the language of the Bible, its rhythms washing over me, and its sense of mystery, burning bushes, ascensions, water into wine, like magical realism.
Catholicism also instilled in me a strong sense of social justice. My parents, deeply engaged in community work, taught us that we have obligations not just to ourselves but to others and to the planet. That moral responsibility is central to who I am and to my writing.
What’s next?
It’s not top secret—I just haven’t written any of it yet. I’ve realized my books tend to alternate between being “in the world” and “out of the world.” My last book, set in a cloistered convent, was about withdrawal. This next one is the opposite—set in a contemporary urban retail workplace, right in the middle of modern chaos. That’s all I know for now—we’ll see what happens.
