Wood’s dystopian novel in which girls who have been involved in sexual scandals find themselves doing hard labour in an isolated outback camp was announced this week as winner of the 2016 Stella Prize, which is open to works of fiction and non-fiction by Australian women.

Her acceptance speech, delivered at the awards presentation, offers an insight into the struggles she – and many writers and artists – face during the creation of new work.

Woods said that on one particularly bad day, she sent an email to friends in which she told them she felt “swamped again with the futility of this work, trying to find the point of writing a dark, bleak book about girls imprisoned and trapped and reviled”.

However, she buoyed herself by coming up with a list of reasons to keep writing and creating, including a desire to make something both beautiful and truthful.

The speech, the full transcript of which can be read on the Stella Prize website, argues that in this “new, dark age”, the world needs art more than ever before.