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
discussion literary prizes
Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.
books england english filled imposed matter seemed
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.
dramatic precise resides truth
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
act filial
As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.
man pays unskilled work
An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.
among ballot
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.
mark
A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.
discover novel seek share
A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.
failure memoir
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.
chip driven exporter government industry largest prospers rate solely
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.
astonished ecological ireland played size whose
In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.
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.
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.
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.