Charlotte Wood has been longlisted for the $98,000 Booker Prize with her acclaimed book Stone Yard Devotional, making her the first Australian nominee since JM Coetzee in 2016.

The novel traces a woman’s rejection of the modern world for a life of service, contemplation and devotion in an outback nunnery in NSW. Its deep themes about what truly matters in life and the search for meaning are universal and Wood’s brilliant, spare prose makes it a compelling read.

The 59-year-old told this masthead she was very moved to hear the news.

“I am so happy that these judges could see that a so-called quiet book can also be an ambitious book and a book of depth with things to say,” Wood says. “Often the way we talk about books in public, we tend to talk about subject matter, we don’t tend to think about language and ideas.

“It’s so satisfying that people who don’t know anything about me can see what the book was trying to do.”

The author of seven novels, including The Natural Way of Things, which won the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and international bestseller The Weekend, Wood has also written three non-fiction works, including The Luminous Solution, a book of essays on the creative process.

Writing in this masthead last year, Helen Elliott described Stone Yard Devotional as “daring because it looks at the obscure and therefore the difficult in the contemporary world”.

“Difficult and obscure, but also something that commonly underpins everything we do,” Elliott wrote. “In a plainer world, this was called the search for meaning when the concept called God is largely absent...”

Wood says this is the most personal book she’s written. Soon after finishing the first draft, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, as were her two sisters, all within the space of six weeks in 2022.