Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby, who judged the prize with Rachel Franks and Rosie Scott, said: "With the skilful use of language seen in her prize-winning poetry, Wright writes frankly and movingly about a difficult and very personal subject. Unlike many memoirs of illness and recovery, hers is not a story of triumph over adversity. The essay form allows her to resist closure, while also providing insights into her reading, her travels and her interactions with others."

In several essays Wright relates her experience to that of characters who starve themselves in the novels For Love Alone by Christina Stead, Cloudstreet by Tim Winton and The Bluebird Cafe by Carmel Bird.

She writes: "I resisted, for a long time ever writing about my illness – although my doctors had been encouraging me to do so, even from the outset of my treatment. I didn't want to write about myself, least of all about my vulnerabilities, I didn't want to be exposed or to expose the thing I thought was ugliest within me, I didn't want to show it to myself…

"But when I did begin to write about my hunger, I was flooded with both apprehension and an intense exhilaration. And because hunger thrives on secrecy, on that private, inviolable inner world [the very thing that makes it so appealing to Rose Pickles], it is less potent when it is public."

After receiving her award at the State Library of NSW on Thursday, Wright said she had not realised how scared she was about going public until the book was published and well reviewed.

"I started feeling really powerful in a way I hadn't expected. When you're unwell you have no control - I felt medicine didn't know what was happening to me, and I didn't know what was happening."

At first she was uncomfortable when people - some with anorexia or anorexic children - thanked her for the book, but she saw that the inability to accept praise was part of her disease.

"I hadn't realised how ashamed I was until I was writing. So many people don't talk about the subject because of shame and because we don't talk about it there is a lot of misinformation. Anorexia is often portrayed as being all about thinness and vanity and so I had been able to say, 'This isn't my problem'."

Now, she says, " I like to say I'm better but not well." She laughed at the recent experience of attending book launches where waiters come by with trays of canapes and turn away from her, saying "Sorry", when she really would like some of the food - if it is cheese.

Small Acts of Disappearance is Wright's second book after a poetry collection, Knuckled, and was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize for women writers and the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Open-ended, non-arrative essays are "the middle ground" between her poetry and her training in journalism, she says.

The $5000 Dobbie Prize for a first-time published author – the Kibble's sibling award – went to Lucy Treloar for her novel Salt Creek, which was book of the year in the Australian Book Industry Awards in May and is shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Salt Creek blends fragments of Treloar's family history with well-researched fact and heartbreaking fiction in the story of a family forced to move from Adelaide to South Australia's Coorong region, narrated from the perspective of the eldest daughter, Hester.

"In a remarkable act of the imagination," Webby said, "Lucy Treloar depicts the changes in Hester as initial strangeness and dislocation give way to a sense of beauty and belonging. She is also forced to question many of the beliefs of her time and class, as she witnesses the destruction of the homes and culture of the local people, the Ngarrindjeri."

Treloar said she had carried from childhood a story of her great great great grandmother being rowed across the Coorong River when she was suffering in obstructed labour. It came back to her as she gave birth to her own child.

Writing the story as a novel enabled her "to find the intersection between life and the imaginary life."

The Nita B. Kibble Awards were established 23 years ago by librarian Nita Dobbie in memory of her aunt, Nita Kibble, who raised her and became the first female librarian at the State Library – after getting her first job when her signature was mistaken for a man's.