'First Person, Flanagan’s first novel since winning the Man Booker Prize in 2014, is inspired by Flanagan’s real-life experience ghost-writing the memoir of Australian conman Johann Friedrich Hohenberger.
'The novel is written in the first person by reality TV producer Kif Kehlman and details how Kif, as a younger, penniless writer unable to finish his first novel, agrees to ghost write the memoir of a notorious con man, Ziggy Heidl, who has defrauded the banks of $700 million.
'As work gets underway, Kif begins to fear that he is being corrupted by the con man and grows ever more uncertain as to whether he is ghost writing a memoir, or if Ziggy Heidl is rewriting him.
'At the novel’s heart is a question: what is the truth?' (Publication summary)
For Nikki Christer
'The ability of literary prizes to sway literary tastes and shape cultural discourse has long been explored through the decisions made by the prize judging panel. The jury of experts, who bring with them symbolic capital and are often regarded as representing a nation’s sophisticated literary palate, have been the subject of extensive scholarship. However, there is a selection process that occurs prior to the commencement of the official or public adjudication. The entry guidelines for individual literary prizes ensure that particular authors and titles will not, or cannot, be considered for the prize and are, therefore, excluded from the symbolic and economic rewards that come with being shortlisted for and winning a literary prize. How do literary prize eligibility requirements limit access to the prestige and promotion that comes with a literary prize? How does the issue of exclusivity influence the ways prizes run, the winners that are chosen and, ultimately, the field-wide conceptions of prize-winning writing?' (Introduction)
'Kif Kehlmann can encapsulate his life in a few phrases: married to Suzy, a devoted wife, with a preschool daughter and twins soon to arrive; living a modest life in Hobart (modest home, twenty-year-old car, serviceable clothing); working as a part-time doorman (and taking on odd jobs as they arise); and writing a novel—a literary one. His wife professes unflinching belief in him, convinced that Kif will produce a book that will earn him celebrity and them a life unconstrained by material want.' (Introduction)
'We live in unsettling times. This isn’t news — both the mainstream media outlets and their alt-news adversaries agree on this point, even if they disagree about what, exactly, has gone wrong. As unnerving as the last few American decades have been, it feels as if the last couple of years have been quantifiably different from what came before, and that the wall that once separated reality from fiction has been beaten into a pile of stones.' (Introduction)
'No one has written better than Henry James about the vocation o: writing, its isolate ecstasies and public humiliations, and the implacable demands it places upon those who devote their lives to its practice. Take the 1888 novella The Lesson of the Master, in which a tyro scribe enters the circle o: Henry St George, a literary eminence now past his prime. In a series of conversations, the senior writer tutors the junior in the inescapable trade-off literature will require of him. It seems he must choose between the lone.y perfection of art and the disabling entanglements of marriage and children.' (Introduction)
'The literature of the modern era contains any number of stories about doppelgängers, divided selves, alter egos, obsessive relationships, and corrosive forms of mutual dependence. The enduring appeal of these doubling motifs is that they give a dramatic structure to abstract moral and psychological conflicts, but they can also be used to suggest that there is something unresolvable or false about our identities. The awareness that the selves we present to others are a kind of projection or performance introduces an element of uncertainty into our social interactions. It opens up the possibilities of self-invention and manipulation and deceit; it raises the question of whether or not we can ever truly claim to know another human being. As an unreliable character points out near the end of Richard Flanagan’s First Person, the word ‘person’ is derived from the Latin persona, meaning a mask.' (Introduction)
'Two deaths – two executions – are at the heart of the darkness that is Richard Flanagan’s new novel, First Person. One takes place in the wild and remote Gulf country of northern Queensland and the other in the seemingly mundane setting of an outer Melbourne suburb. Notwithstanding these different environments, they are two versions of essentially the same scene. In each, a journey to a place beyond streets, houses, families and women culminates in an act of violence, which is conjured out of the chaos of masculine relationships by the agency of bullying dressed up as mateship. Or, more simply: two men go into the bush with a gun and only one of them comes out.' (Introduction)
'Kif Kehlmann can encapsulate his life in a few phrases: married to Suzy, a devoted wife, with a preschool daughter and twins soon to arrive; living a modest life in Hobart (modest home, twenty-year-old car, serviceable clothing); working as a part-time doorman (and taking on odd jobs as they arise); and writing a novel—a literary one. His wife professes unflinching belief in him, convinced that Kif will produce a book that will earn him celebrity and them a life unconstrained by material want.' (Introduction)
'The real question here is: how does one follow up such a magnificent, life-changing, world-changing novel as The Narrow Road to the Deep North?'
'Truth is stranger than fiction,' Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator, the travelogue that included his visit to Australia. And 'Australian history.' he decided, 'does not read like history, but like the most beautiful of lies … but they are all true, they all happened.'Fiction and identity have been significant themes of Richard Flanagan’s work, with most of his books exploring the blurred borders between history and narrative, the public and the personal, truth and invention. (Introduction)
'The Booker prize winner on his new novel and why it’s not always possible to separate fact from fiction.
'No one has written better than Henry James about the vocation o: writing, its isolate ecstasies and public humiliations, and the implacable demands it places upon those who devote their lives to its practice. Take the 1888 novella The Lesson of the Master, in which a tyro scribe enters the circle o: Henry St George, a literary eminence now past his prime. In a series of conversations, the senior writer tutors the junior in the inescapable trade-off literature will require of him. It seems he must choose between the lone.y perfection of art and the disabling entanglements of marriage and children.' (Introduction)
