Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan (born 1961, Longford, Tasmania, Australia) Australian writer who was known for a series of critically acclaimed works. He was widely considered “the finest Australian novelist of his generation.”

Flanagan was raised in Rosebery, a remote mining town in the island state of Tasmania. He left high school when he was 16, but he later earned a B.A. (1983) from the University of Tasmania. In 1984 he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to attend Worcester College, Oxford, where he earned a Masters of Letters.

His first novel, Death of a River Guide (1994), an account of a drowning man reflecting on his life and those of his ancestors, earned the 1996 Australian National Fiction Award. That work was followed by the highly acclaimed novel The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), a tale of the harsh life of a Slovenian immigrant family in Tasmania during the 20th century. His novel Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001), about a 19th-century convict living in Tasmania, was awarded the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book as well as the Commonwealth’s Regional Prize for best book. The Unknown Terrorist (2006) was a modern-day thriller that took aim at media-driven hysteria, and Wanting (2008) was a complex 19th-century tale set in Tasmania and England involving an Aboriginal girl and novelist Charles Dickens.

In 2013 Flanagan released The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which was based in part on the experience of Flanagan’s father as a prisoner of war during World War II. The novel was acclaimed for its brutally stark narrative of life as a prisoner and slave labourer as well as for its gripping examination of individual lives, personal relationships, and conflict that, despite taking place in a historical setting, was lauded as being relevant in modern times. The work was a labour of love for Flanagan, one that took him more than a decade to complete to his satisfaction: he reportedly discarded five drafts of the novel before submitting the final version. The Narrow Road to the Deep North received various honours, notably the Man Booker Prize. Flanagan’s next novel, First Person (2017), concerns a a struggling writer who is hired to ghostwrite a conman’s memoir. In The Living Sea of Walking Dreams (2020), three siblings argue over medical treatment for their dying mother while the climate crisis worsens. The work, which includes elements of surrealism, explores people’s refusal to acknowledge harsh realities, whether it is impending death or an environmental catastrophe.

In addition to his novels, Flanagan published essays and historical nonfiction, notably “Parish-Fed Bastards”: A History of the Politics of the Unemployed in Britain, 1884–1939 (1991) and Codename Iago: The Story of John Friedrich (1991, with Friedrich), an account of Australia’s most infamous conman. Notes on an Exodus (2016) was an essay about Syrian refugees, with illustrations by Ben Quilty. Flanagan was also a respected journalist; his articles appeared regularly in The New Yorker magazine and the Paris newspaper Le Monde. He also directed the film adaptation of The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998) and was one of the writers who worked on the screenplay for the epic Australia (2008), directed by Baz Luhrmann.