Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan
Richard Miller Flanaganis an Australian novelist from Tasmania. "Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist, each of his novels has attracted major praise and received numerous awards and honours. He also has written and directed feature films. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
CountryAustralia
great greatly honoured prizes
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
area art english enigma germany given larger mysterious northwest paintings scarcely scattered thousands title
'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.
great people shakespeare
Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.
family words
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew.
abandon advised believe change climate emissions julia kevin prime
A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.
anyone came camp fear met official round taken time younger
I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.
looked
I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.
australia believed generous good itself land large latter seemed
For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'
tiny town
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
cecil imperial
I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.
grew returned strongly time
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.
contain life love
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
cry poor
I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.
built death japanese million prisoner quarter slave survivor war
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.