'Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows.
'By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.
'At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.' (Publication summary)
'The Australian’s book about his parents’ love and his father’s horrific experience of Burma’s Death Railway won the illustrious nonfiction award. Here he talks about finding beauty and hope in the age of extinction and despair' (Introduction)
'The Tasmanian novelist – whose latest book, Question 7, is up for both fiction and nonfiction prizes – on HG Wells, the TV adaptation of his Booker prize winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North… and his much-missed parrot, Herb' (Introduction)
'Richard Flanagan’s new book progresses like a nuclear chain reaction, moving from personal narrative to world events.'
Richard Flanagan at The Capitol Discussing 'Question 7'
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2024
27446496
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'Richard Flanagan is a Tasmania writer. Question 7, his latest work, was published in 2023 and will no doubt become that rare thing - a commercial bestseller that attracts critical acclaim.' (Introduction)
'I was asked recently who I thought was the greatest nature writer in Tasmania. I scratched my head and thought: who is it that emerges above the rest as someone who best understands and articulates the haunting beauty and mystery of this ancient island’s environment? Who understands deeply the captivating endemics of this island and has been able to write best about it?' (Introduction)
'The most astonishing and accomplished sequence in Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 arrives near the book’s end, as he describes the near-death experience that inspired his first novel, Death of a River Guide, published in 1994.' (Introduction)
'When Richard Flanagan left school, he tells us early in Question 7, he worked as a chainman or surveyor’s labourer, ‘a job centuries old set to vanish only a few years later with the advent of digital technology’. Chainmen would have followed the surveyors who mapped Van Diemen’s Land and the rest of the British Empire; their task was to ‘drag the twenty-two-yard chain with its hundred links with which the world was measured’. The clanking surveyor’s measure evokes convict chains, and it demonstrates one of the principles at the heart of this book: that the past lives and redounds in the present. The chainman is a descendant of convicts, and he insists that ‘there was no straight line of history. There was only a circle.’' (Introduction)
'Who could be grateful for the bombing of Hiroshima at 8.15am on August 6, 1945: an unprecedented, world-changing act of warfare that saw, as Richard Flanagan puts it, “60,000 Japanese souls ascending to heaven”? Flanagan might be.' (Introduction)
The Measure of Things
2023
27232631
2023
single work
podcast
'In this week’s ABR Podcast, Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Richard Flanagan’s new hybrid work Question 7. Menzies-Pike argues that Flanagan’s ‘sweeping engagement with history ultimately brings the author back to himself’ in ways that limit understanding of the present tense. Catriona Menzies-Pike is a literary critic and former editor of the Sydney Review of Books. Listen to ‘The Measure of things: Flanagan’s looping book of questions’, published in the November issue of ABR.' (Production summary)
'Thirty years ago, wanting to probe deeper into the question of what it meant to make home in Tasmania, I enrolled to do my honours year at the University of Tasmania. During a discussion with the secretary of the History Department about my partially formed dissertation ideas, she urged me to read a thesis by a recent graduate whose work had greatly impressed her: one Richard Flanagan. When I read the thesis and the book that came out of it, the result can best be described as a soul shift. It was not so much the information I gained but that Flanagan’s approach to Tasmania’s past released an imaginative flow in my own research, allowing it to slowly metamorphose over fifteen years into my first book, Van Diemen’s Land. I share this anecdote, not just to highlight what was lost when universities sacked most of their administrative staff, but to show how seriously Richard Flanagan has always taken history.' (Introduction)
The Cause and Effect of Richard Flanagan
Michael Williams
(interviewer),
2023
27242293
2023
single work
podcast
interview
'Described by the Washington Post as "one of our greatest living novelists", Richard Flanagan has been writing for more than three decades. His 2013 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the Booker Prize and his essays have been published across Australia and internationally. This week Michael heads to Tasmania to speak with Richard at his home in Hobart about his latest and most personal novel, Question 7.' (Publication abstract)
