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
man
In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.
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If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.
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In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
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In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
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I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.
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There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.
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You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.
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What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
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Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.
Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.
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Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.
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We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
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The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.
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It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.