Richard Flanagan

Richard Miller Flanagan (born 1961) is an Australian writer, who has also worked as a film director and screenwriter.

Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961, the fifth of six children.

He is descended from Irish convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land during the Great Famine in Ireland.

Flanagan's father was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway and one of his three brothers is Australian rules football journalist Martin Flanagan.

Flanagan was born with severe hearing loss, which was corrected when he was six years old.

He grew up in the remote mining town of Rosebery on Tasmania's western coast.

Flanagan left school at the age of 16 but returned to study at the University of Tasmania, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with First-Class Honours.

Flanagan was president of the Tasmania University Union in 1983.

The following year, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Worcester College, Oxford, where he earned the degree of Master of Letters in History.

Flanagan wrote four non-fiction works before moving to fiction, works that he called "his apprenticeship".

One of these was Codename Iago, an autobiography of Australian con man John Friedrich, which Flanagan ghostwrote in six weeks to make money to write his first novel.

Friedrich killed himself in the middle of the book's writing and it was published posthumously.

Simon Caterson, writing in The Australian, described it as "one of the least reliable but most fascinating memoirs in the annals of Australian publishing".

Flanagan's first novel, Death of a River Guide (1994), is the tale of Aljaz Cosini, a river guide, who lies drowning, reliving his life and the lives of his family and forebears.

It was described by The Times Literary Supplement as "one of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing".

The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), tells the story of Slovenian immigrants, was a major bestseller, selling more than 150,000 copies in Australia.

Flanagan's first two novels, declared Kirkus Reviews, "rank with the finest fiction out of Australia since the heyday of Patrick White".

Gould's Book of Fish (2001) is based on the life of William Buelow Gould, a convict artist, and tells the tale of his love affair with a young black woman in 1828.

It won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Flanagan described these early novels as 'soul histories'.

"The Selling-out of Tasmania", published after the death of former Premier Jim Bacon in 2004, was critical of the Bacon government's relationship with corporate interests in the state.

Premier Paul Lennon declared, "Richard Flanagan and his fictions are not welcome in the new Tasmania".

The Unknown Terrorist (2006), was described by The New York Times as "stunning ... a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world".

Flanagan's 2007 essay on logging company Gunns, then the biggest hardwood woodchipper in the world, "Gunns. Out of Control" in The Monthly, first published as "Paradise Razed" in The Telegraph (London), inspired Sydney businessman Geoffrey Cousins' high-profile campaign to stop the building of Gunns' two billion dollar Bell Bay Pulp Mill.

Cousins reprinted 50,000 copies of the essay for letterboxing in the electorates of Australia's environment minister and opposition environment spokesperson.

Gunns subsequently collapsed with huge debt, its CEO John Gay found guilty of insider trading, and the pulp mill was never built.

Wanting (2008) tells two parallel stories: about the novelist Charles Dickens in England, and Mathinna, an Aboriginal orphan adopted by Sir John Franklin, the colonial governor of Van Diemen's Land, and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin.

As well as being a New Yorker Book of the Year and Observer Book of the Year, it won the Queensland Premier's Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Prize and the Tasmania Book Prize.

Flanagan's essay won the 2008 John Curtin Prize for Journalism.

A collection of his non-fiction was published as And What Do You Do, Mr Gable? (2011).

The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), about a Tasmanian doctor who becomes a Japanese prisoner of war, won the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Flanagan was described by the Washington Post as "one of our greatest living novelists".

"[C]onsidered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist, the New York Review of Books described Flanagan as "among the most versatile writers in the English language".

First Person (2017), based loosely on his experience early in his writing career ghost-writing the autobiography of John Friedrich.

The New Yorker noted "the novel, with its switchbacking recollections and cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, eventually, death, is enigmatic and mesmerizing" while the New York Review of Books called it a "tour-de-force".

Robert Dixon's (ed.) Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays (2018) offers different perspectives on Flanagan's writing, while Joyce Carol Oates has written an overview of his novels for the New York Review of Books.

Flanagan has written on literature, the environment, art and politics for the Australian and international press including Le Monde, The Daily Telegraph (London), Suddeutsche Zeitung, The Monthly, The New York Times, and the New Yorker.

Some of his writings have proved controversial.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) about a woman caring for her dying mother during Australia's Black Summer of climate change induced wildfires, was described in a review for The Sydney Morning Herald as "a revelation and a triumph . . . astonishing".