'On 14 October 2014 Richard Flanagan was awarded the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013). It was a signal moment not only in his own career but also in the international reception of Australian literature. In his acceptance speech and in media interviews in London, however, Flanagan identified with Tasmania rather than Australia, explaining, "I do not come out of a literary tradition. I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest on an island at the end of the world." Echoing Salman Rushdie in the wake of his own Booker win for Midnight's Children in 1981, Flanagan went on to claim that "Literary culture... is the vengeance of the edges on the centre".'