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
believe noun
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
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In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
people torn
We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.
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What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.
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Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.
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There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.
great spend work
You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.
family love
Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you to say all those things.
change choose compass dismissed easily everyday hope power touch
If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real.
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In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.
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Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world.
failure memoir
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.
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A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.
mark
A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.