Born: Established: 1961 Longford, Northern Midlands, Midlands, Tasmania, ;
Gender:
Male
In 2016 Flanagan was appointed as the Boisbouvier Founding Chair in Australian Literature at The University of Melbourne.
Voted number 28 in the Booktopia Top 50 Favourite Australian Authors for 2018
Other works not individually indexed include:
Seize the Fire : Three Speeches (Penguin Random House Australia, 2018)
Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry (2021)
Question 7
Sydney
:
Knopf Australia
,
2023
25958821
2023
single work
prose
'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 Living Sea of Waking Dreams
Melbourne
:
Penguin
,
2020
19615971
2020
single work
novel
'In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight.
'When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.
'An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving—and astonishing—best.' (Publication summary)
First Person
Melbourne
:
Penguin Random House Australia
,
2017
10929917
2017
single work
novel
'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)
